Computer Science 1300
    Essential Computer Skills

    Class Notes
    September 8, 1998

     

        Announcements:

      1.  CBT training modules:  Update.  The reason you couldn't access these is that most students in the class had not been added to the database of users with permission to use them.  Should work now!  When prompted for your "student id", enter your username.  (If that doesn't work, use mine:  cbrown.  But yours should work now.)

      Also, user services recently told me (contrary to what I was told earlier) that if you go to one of the labs and copy the CBT icon on the desktop onto a floppy, then copy it from the floppy onto your computer in the residence halls, it should allow you to access the CBT modules from your room.  If someone tries this and it works, let me know.

        Class Summary:

      What is a computer?  According to the definition in our text, a computer is "a device that takes data in one form, processes it, and transforms it into information that is more useful than the original data."

      This is why computers are sometimes called information processing devices.  They take information in one form as input, modify it in some way, and produce information in another form as output.  This leads to a number of important questions, including:

      Questions about the information:  what kinds of information are there?  how is information stored in primary (or secondary) memory?  These topics will be addressed a bit more fully in the September 10 class (and in chapter 2 of the text).

      Questions about the processing:  What does the processing?  How does it do it?  The short answers:  the machine's hardware does the processing, and it does it by carrying out instructions (programs).

      Hardware:  We discussed the CPU (including its components the CU or control unit, which controls information flow inside the CPU and between the CPU and primary memory, and the ALU or arithmetic & logic unit, which actually carries out the arithmetic and logical operations required by the instructions); primary memory, which is RAM or random-access memory, as opposed to sequential access memory; and various input devices (such as the keyboard, floppy drives, hard drives, CD-ROM drives, scanners, modems, etc) and output devices (such as monitors, printers, and, again, floppy drives and hard drives).

      Software:  The instructions the machine carries out in order to modify data.  But these instructions themselves are also stored as data files.  Considerably more on this later, especially in connection with chapter 5 of the text.

      Kinds of computers:  We discussed the important distinctions between analog vs. digital, special-purpose vs. general-purpose, and mechanical vs. electronic.  In this course, we will be almost exclusively concerned with general-purpose electronic digital computers.

      Trinity University  |  Curtis Brown  |  CSCI 1300:  Essential Computing Skills