Web Commerce Security Design and Development

Hardware

A computer is an electronic device. In a very simplistic way, you could accurately say that computers are just electronic calculators. It is the job of programmers and system designers to break down a large, complicated task into small pieces of calculable logical operations, and then feed them into a computing system and let it do its job: perform calculations. The logical operations that we are referring to here are called instructions. Instructions are basic commands that are originated by a piece of software, have gone through various types of modifications and massages (namely compilation), and are finally prepared in a form suitable to consume (or process) by a CPU. Let's see what all that means in human terms.

Central Processing Unit

Obviously a computer is an electronic device. Similar to other electronic devices, a computer has many different electrical components. One of those core pieces is a small semiconductor component called a transistor. There are different types of transistors. The main types are bipolar and field effect. A bipolar transistor is an electronic component that has three connectors called terminals (named base, collector, and emitter). You work with a bipolar transistor by applying a signal to one pair of terminals (base and emitter) that can perform switching a signal on another pair (collector and emitter). The operation of field-effect transistors is slightly different. A transistor can also perform other operations such as amplification ...