okok, assalamualaikum =)
new life, ayt yg biasa utk student yg furthe study mcm ak.. tempat baru, katil baru, kwn baru, persekitaran baru.. hmmm.. mule2, sumua org pun susah nak biasakan diri kn.. tapi alhamdulillah la, skrg aku dah boleh biasakn diri ( TT___TT )
mula2 masa masuk IPT ni.. kitorang kena MSK(minggu suai kenal) ya allah aku rasa mcm nak mati masa ni.. jadual sgt tight.. kakak senior pun garang :'( ( hati aku ni dah la halus).. tapi after MSK tu baru laa ak rasa tenang dan aman ( chewahh)..
then bermula sesi pembelajaran kami.. lecturer ok laa.. nak2 miss fiza n mdm imelda.. sporting kot ;)
classmates yg ak rapat kt sini nama dia farhana, nana n meyl.. semua pun cantik2 belaka (gituu)
ok cite psl pembelanjaan pulak.. ak dah mula belajar berjimat.. makan pun sukat.. bukan x mampu tapi apa salahnya kita cuba berjimat cermat... ringan kan beban ayah kita :)
apa2 pun.. bila berjauhan dari parents ni.. jgn laa kita ambil kesmpatan utk bersosial berlebihan.. kita yg jauh ni, doakanlah kesejahteraan ibubapa kita ya ;) dan doakan utk diri sendiri supaya allah berikan hidayah dan mudahkan kita mendapat ilmu, amiin =)
Computers are made of the following basic components:
- Case with hardware inside:
- Power Supply - The power supply comes with the case, but this
component is mentioned separately since there are various types of power
supplies. The one you should get depends on the requirements of your system.
This will be discussed in more detail later
- Motherboard - This is where the core components of your computer
reside which are listed below. Also the support cards for video, sound,
networking and more are mounted into this board.
- Microprocessor - This is the brain of your computer. It performs
commands and instructions and controls the operation of the computer.
- Memory - The RAM in your system is mounted on the motherboard. This
is memory that must be powered on to retain its contents.
- Drive controllers - The drive controllers control the interface of
your system to your hard drives. The controllers let your hard drives work by
controlling their operation. On most systems, they are included on the
motherboard, however you may add additional controllers for faster or other
types of drives.
Hard disk drive(s) - This is where your files are permanently stored
on your computer. Also, normally, your operating system is installed
here.
CD-ROM drive(s) - This is normally a read only drive where files are
permanently stored. There are now read/write CD-ROM drives that use special
software to allow users to read from and write to these drives.
Floppy drive(s) - A floppy is a small disk storage device that today
typically has about 1.4 Megabytes of memory capacity.
Other possible file storage devices include DVD devices, Tape backup
devices, and some others.
Monitor - This device which operates like a TV set lets the user see
how the computer is responding to their commands.
Keyboard - This is where the user enters text commands into the
computer.
Mouse - A point and click interface for entering commands which works
well in graphical environments.
Palm PCs or Simputer
With miniaturization and high-density packing of transistor on a chip, computers with capabilities nearly that of PCs which can be held in a palm have emerged. Palm accept handwritten inputs using an electronic pen which can be used to write on a Palm’s screen (besides a tiny keyboard), have small disk storage and can be connected to a wireless network. One has to train the system on the user’s handwriting before it can be used as a mobile phone, Fax, and e-mail machine. A version of Microsoft operating system called Windows-CE is available for Palm.An Indian initiative to meet the needs of rural population of developing countries is called Simputer. Simputer is a mobile handheld computer with input through icons on a touch sensitive overly on the LCD display panel. A unique feature of Simputer is the use of free open source OS called GNU/Linux. The cost of ownership is thus low as there is no software cost for OS. Another unique feature of Simputer not found in Palm, is a smart card reader/writer, which increases the functionality of the Simputer including possibility of personalization of a single Simputer for several users
Laptop PCs:
Laptop PCs (also known as notebook computers) are portable computers weighing around 2 kgs. They have a keyboard, flat screen liquid crystal display, and a Pentium or Power PC processor. Colour displays are available. They normally run using WINDOWS OS. Laptops come with hard disk (around 40 GB), CDROM and floppy disk. They should run with batteries and are thus designed to conserve energy by using power efficient chips. Many Laptops can be connected to a network. There is a trend towards providing wireless connectivity to Laptops so that they can read files from large stationary computers. The most common use of Laptop computers is used for word processing, and spreadsheet computing. As Laptops use miniature components which have to consume low power and have to be packaged in small volumes.
Personal Computers (PCs)
The most popular PCs are desktop machines. Early PCs had Intel 8088 microprocessors as their CPU. Currently (2004), Intel Dual Core is the most popular processor. The machines made by IBM are called IBM PCs. Other manufacturers use IBM’s specifications and design their own PCs. They are known aPalm PCs or Simputer
With miniaturization and high-density packing of transistor on a chip, computers with capabilities nearly that of PCs which can be held in a palm have emerged. Palm accept handwritten inputs using an electronic pen which can be used to write on a Palm’s screen (besides a tiny keyboard), have small disk storage and can be connected to a wireless network. One has to train the system on the user’s handwriting before it can be used as a mobile phone, Fax, and e-mail machine. A version of Microsoft operating system called Windows-CE is available for Palm.An Indian initiative to meet the needs of rural population of developing countries is called Simputer. Simputer is a mobile handheld computer with input through icons on a touch sensitive overly on the LCD display panel. A unique feature of Simputer is the use of free open source OS called GNU/Linux. The cost of ownership is thus low as there is no software cost for OS. Another unique feature of Simputer not found in Palm, is a smart card reader/writer, which increases the functionality of the Simputer including possibility of personalization of a single Simputer for several users
Laptop PCs:
Laptop PCs (also known as notebook computers) are portable computers weighing around 2 kgs. They have a keyboard, flat screen liquid crystal display, and a Pentium or Power PC processor. Colour displays are available. They normally run using WINDOWS OS. Laptops come with hard disk (around 40 GB), CDROM and floppy disk. They should run with batteries and are thus designed to conserve energy by using power efficient chips. Many Laptops can be connected to a network. There is a trend towards providing wireless connectivity to Laptops so that they can read files from large stationary computers. The most common use of Laptop computers is used for word processing, and spreadsheet computing. As Laptops use miniature components which have to consume low power and have to be packaged in small volumes.
Personal Computers (PCs)
The most popular PCs are desktop machines. Early PCs had Intel 8088 microprocessors as their CPU.
s IBM compatible PCs. IBM PCs mostly use MS-Windows, WINDOWS –XP or GNU/Linux as Operating System. IBM PCs, nowadays (2004) have 64 to 256 MB main memory, 40 to 80 GB of Hard Disk and a floppy disk or flash ROM. Besides these a 650 MB CDROM is also provided in PCs intended for multimedia use. Another company called Apple also makes pCs. Apple PCs are known as Apple Macintosh. They use Apple’s proprietary OS, which is designed for simplicity of use. Apple Macintosh machines used Motorola 68030 microprocessors but now use Power PC 603 processor. IBM PCs are today the most popular computers with millions of them in use throughout the world.
Workstations:
Workstations are also desktop machines. They are, however, more powerful providing processorspeeds about 10 times that of PCs. Most workstations have a large colour video display unit (19 inch monitors). Normally they have main memory of around 256 MB to 4 GB and Hard Disk of 80 to 320 GB. Workstations normally use RISC processors such as MIPS (SIG), RIOS (IBM), SPARC (SUN), or PA-RISC (HP). Some manufacturers of Workstations are Silicon Graphics (SIG), IBM, SUN Microsystems and Hewlett Packard (HP). The standard Operating System of Workstations is UNIX and its derivatives such as AIX (IBM), Solaris (SUN), and HP-UX (HP). Very good graphics facilities and large video screens are provided by most Workstations. A system called X WINDOWS is provided by Workstations to display the status of multiple processes during their execution. Most Workstations have built-in hardware to connect to a Local Area Network (LAN). Workstations are used for executing numeric and graphic intensive applications such as those, which arise in Computer Aided Design, simulation of complex systems and visualizing the results of simulation.
Servers
While manufacturers such as IBM, SUN and Silicon Graphics have been manufacturing high performance workstations the speed of Intel Pentium Processors has been going up. In 2004, Pentium with clock speed 3 GHz are available. They can support several GB main memories. Thus the difference between high end PCs and Workstations is vanishing. Today companies such as SUN make Intel based workstations.While Workstations are characterized by high performance processors with large screens for interactive programming, servers are used for specific purpose such as high performance numerical computing (called compute server), web page hosting, database store, printing etc. interactive large screens are not necessary. Compute servers have performance processors with large main memory, database servers have big on-line disk storage (100s of GB) and print servers support several high speed printers.
Mainframes Computers
There are organizations such as banks and insurance companies process large number of transactions on-line. They require computers with very large disks to store several Terabytes of data and transfer data from disk to main memory at several hundred Megabytes/sec. The processing power needed from such computers is hundred million transactions per second. These computers are much bigger and faster than workstations and several hundred times more expensive. They normally use proprietary operating systems, which usually provide high expensive services such as user accounting, file security and control. They are normally much more reliable when compared to Operating System on PCs. These types of computers are called mainframes. These are a few manufacturers of mainframes (e.g., IBM and Hitachi). The number of mainframe users has reduced as many organizations are rewriting their systems to use networks of powerful workstations.
Supercomputers
Supercomputers are the fastest computers available at any given time and are normally used to solve problems, which require intensive numerical computations. Examples of such problems are numerical weather prediction, designing supersonic aircrafts, design of drugs and modeling complex molecules. All of these problems require around 10^16calculations to be performed. These problems will be solved in about 3 hours by a computer, which can carry out a trillion floating point calculations per second. Such a computer is classifieds as supercomputer today (2004). By about the year 2006 computers which can carry out 10^15 floating point operations per second on 64 bit floating point numbers would be available and would be the ones which be called supercomputers. Interconnecting several high speed computers and programming them to work cooperatively to solve problems build supercomputers. Recently applications of supercomputers have expanded beyond scientific computing, they are now used to analyze large commercial database, produced animated movies and play games such as chess.Besides arithmetic speed, a computer to be classified as a supercomputer should have a large main memory of around 16 GB and a secondary memory of 1000 GB. The speed of transfer of data from secondary memory to the main memory should be at least a tenth of the memory to CPU data transfer speed. All supercomputers use parallelism to achieve their speed. In Sec. 12.9 we discuss the organization of parallel computers
The First Generation:
1946-1958 (The Vacuum Tube Years)
The first
generation computers were huge, slow, expensive, and often undependable. In
1946
two
Americans, Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly built the ENIAC
electronic computer which used vacuum tubes instead of the mechanical switches
of the Mark I. The ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes, which took up a
lot of space and gave off a great deal of heat just like light bulbs do. The
ENIAC led to other vacuum tube type computers like the EDVAC (Electronic
Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) and the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal
Automatic Computer).
The vacuum tube was an extremely important step in the advancement of
computers. Vacuum tubes were invented the same time the light bulb was
invented by Thomas Edison and worked very similar to light bulbs. It's purpose
was to act like an amplifier and a switch. Without
any moving parts, vacuum tubes could take very weak signals and make the signal
stronger (amplify it). Vacuum tubes could also stop and start the
flow of electricity instantly (switch). These two properties made
the ENIAC computer possible.
The ENIAC gave off so much heat that they had to be cooled by
gigantic air conditioners. However even with these huge coolers, vacuum tubes
still overheated regularly. It was time for something new.
The Second Generation:
1959-1964 (The Era of the Transistor)
The transistor computer did not last as long as the vacuum
tube computer lasted, but it was no less important in the advancement of
computer technology. In 1947 three scientists, John Bardeen,
William Shockley,
and Walter Brattain working at AT&T's Bell Labs invented what
would replace the vacuum tube forever. This invention was the transistor
which functions like a vacuum tube in that it can be used to relay and switch
electronic signals.
There were obvious differences between the
transisitor and the vacuum tube. The transistor was faster, more reliable,
smaller, and much cheaper to build than a vacuum tube. One transistor replaced
the equivalent of 40 vacuum tubes. These transistors were made of solid
material, some of which is silicon, an abundant element (second only to
oxygen) found in beach sand and glass. Therefore they were very cheap to
produce. Transistors were found to conduct electricity faster and
better than vacuum tubes. They were also much smaller and gave
off virtually no heat compared to vacuum tubes. Their use marked a new
beginning for the computer. Without this invention, space travel in the 1960's
would not have been possible. However, a new invention would even
further advance our ability to use computers.
The Third Generation:
1965-1970 (Integrated Circuits - Miniaturizing the Computer)
Transistors were a tremendous breakthrough in
advancing the computer. However no one could predict that thousands even now
millions of transistors (circuits) could be compacted in such a small space.
The integrated circuit, or as it is sometimes referred to as
semiconductor chip, packs a huge number of transistors onto a single
wafer of silicon. Robert Noyce of Fairchild
Corporation and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments independently
discovered the amazing attributes of integrated circuits. Placing such large
numbers of transistors on a single chip vastly increased the power of a single
computer and lowered its cost considerably.
Since the invention of integrated circuits, the
number of transistors that can be placed on a single chip has doubled
every two years, shrinking both the size and cost of computers even
further and further enhancing its power. Most electronic devices today use some
form of integrated circuits placed on printed circuit boards-- thin
pieces of bakelite or fiberglass that have electrical connections
etched onto them -- sometimes called a mother board.
These third generation computers could carry out
instructions in billionths of a second. The size of these machines dropped to
the size of small file cabinets. Yet, the single biggest advancement in
the computer era was yet to be discovered.
The Fourth Generation:
1971-Today (The Microprocessor)
This generation can be characterized by both the jump to
monolithic integrated circuits
(millions of transistors put onto one
integrated circuit chip) and the invention of the microprocessor (a
single chip that could do all the processing of a full-scale computer).
By putting millions of transistors onto one single chip more calculation
and faster speeds could be reached by computers. Because electricity travels
about a foot in a billionth of a second, the smaller the distance the greater
the speed of computers.
However what really triggered the tremendous growth of computers and
its significant impact on our lives is the invention of the
microprocessor. Ted Hoff, employed by Intel (Robert
Noyce's new company) invented a chip the size of a pencil eraser that
could do all the computing and logic work of a computer. The microprocessor was
made to be used in calculators, not computers. It led, however, to the
invention of personal computers, or microcomputers.
It wasn't until the 1970's that people began buying computer for
personal use. One of the 
earliest personal computers was the Altair 8800 computer kit.
In 1975 you could purchase this kit and put it together to make your own
personal computer. In 1977 the Apple 
II was sold to the public and in 1981 IBM
entered the PC (personal computer) market
Fifth Generation (Present and Beyond) Artificial Intelligence
Fifth generation computing devices, based on artificial intelligence, are still in development, though there are some applications, such as voice recognition, that are being used today. The use of parallel processing and superconductors is helping to make artificial intelligence a reality. Quantum computation and molecular and nanotechnology will radically change the face of computers in years to come. The goal of fifth-generation computing is to develop devices that respond to natural language input and are capable of learning and self-organization
alhamdulillah.. kejap je dh tiba bulan puasa.. tahun ni x dpt lee nk sambut dgn family TT___TT
sedih amat.. tapi x pe la.. lambat laun kena jugak kan sambut sendiri..
walaupun kesunyian tanpa family (chewaahh) alhamdulillah kwn2 kt ipt ni semua ok2 belaka.. nak2 roomate saya.. baik n sekepala :)
apa2 pun, sempena tulis entry ni, saya nak ucapkan,
SELAMAT MENYAMBUT RAMADHAN AL-MUBARAK :)
hmm, x sabar ni nak beli baju raya :) so, bulan puasa ni, fhm2 la... semua masing2 akan memboros di bazar.. so mari la kita sama2 berjimat cermat dan bersyukur dgn apa yg ada.. sekian.. wallahualam!! ^__^
