Introduction to Computer Hardware

In general, there is very little that you as a future manager need to know about computer hardware, other than some basic vocabulary. The key ideas we want to you understand about hardware are:

* Computers are basically simple electronic devices. While what they do may seem magical, very little of the magic comes from the computer itself. In fact computers are limited in what they can do. * More of the magic comes from the software – the set of instructions that tell the computer how to process and display data (and we’ll talk more about that in the following classes). * Most of the magic comes from the way people use the information produced by the computer, and (most importantly) the way they recognize, manage, and overcome the limits of computer-based information.

To understand and manage these limitations, you need to have a basic understanding of hardware and software.

We can use the systems model (input-process-output) to categorize hardware. There are input devices (e.g., a keyboard) and output devices (e.g. a monitor). We also need to store intermediate and final results of computations, so we need data storage devices (e.g., hard drives). The process is represented by the “processing unit” of the computer (also called a Central Processing Unit or CPU). While it gets a little technical, it is worth understanding how a CPU works, because you need to understand that before you can understand how software works. And you need to understand how software works, so that you can understand what its limitations are. Here is a picture of a typical computer hardware design (sometimes called the “computer architecture”):

The CPU (shown in blue) is made up of two sub-units. One is called the “arithmetic/logic unit” or ALU. The ALU does arithmetic and logic! Remember arithmetic? (OK, we know we are