Chapter 2. PC Anatomy 101

In this chapter

You can walk into most furniture stores and see a 3D cardboard facsimile of a computer: It's the kind of thing that stores put on display to help you realize that the computer desk on sale this week will, in fact, hold a computer. What is it about a real computer that makes it different than the cardboard phony?

The real computer has a central processing unit (CPU) to create and modify information; instructions, to tell the CPU what to do; a place to store the instructions and the output they produce ...

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