Essay/Term paper: The basics of a hard drive

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Internet

The Basics of A Hard Drive


I'm sure, by now you have used a computer be it to play games or write a
paper. But do you know how a computer works and runs all the programs you what
it to? Well if not I will tell you. To begin with I will explain a little about
the history about the computers history. About 50 years or maybe a little longer
someone came up with the thought that all the boring stuff like math could be
automated so humans would not have to do it all. Hence the computer, as to who
exactly I could not tell you. That person than began to work with his Idea and
figured out that if he could turn a machine on and off at a specified time for a
specified time he could in a way alter what it could do. To turn it on and off
he came up with a very interesting way, he used a sheet that looked almost like
a scantron sheet but with holes and those holes where used to turn it on and off.
The holes represented 1s and the noholes 0s. the 1s turned it on an the 0s
turned it off. With this knowledge he began to make little programs that could
solve math problems. I guess he must have gotten bored with the math or
something because he came up with a way to let him play tic-tack toe with the
computer, which by the way was the first came ever to be created on the computer.
Now there is one more thing you have to know about this computer, the computer
was half the size of West High Schools gym. And it was thought that when it was
ecomoical for people to own there own computer it would fill a decent size room.
Could you imagine a computer filling up your entire living room, where wolud you
put your TV? But with the invetion of keyboards and nanotechnology they reduced
the size of the computer by nearly 200% and every year the keep getting smaller
and smaller and it is estimated that nearly 85 to 90 percent of American homes
have at least one computer in their home.
Now that I have bored you to death with the history of computers here's
the fun stuff.
Programs that let you play games and surf the net aren't just ideas put
in a niffty little box and sold. They are ideas put on paper then translated
into a really, really huge math problem that the computer can understand, after
all the computer was invented to do math problems, by people called programers.
From there the computer further translates the math problems into 1s and 0s
which in turn translates into the image you see on the computer screen. And all
this is stored on a little thing called a hard drive. Now before I go to far
into depth on this topic, imagine a city block with excatly 1000 houses on it
and every house can only store so much, so when that house fills up the house
next it the last one fills up and being the nice people they are let the
computer pull any thing it needs out of the houses to use and when its done with
the stuff it puts it back in the same house. The process described above is what
makes up a hard drive.