Week 2 reading notes

I have to apologize for the extreme lateness in posting these - I got very confused about when each readings were due when and only recently got it straightened out. Week 3's reading notes will be up later today.

Notes on personal computer hardware:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_hardware)

Typical PC hardware includes:

Motherboard
-- Central Processing Unit (CPU)
-- Chipset
-- RAM
-- Basic Input Output System (BIOS)
-- Internal buses
-- External bus controllers

Power supply
-- Power cords, switch, cooling fan

Video display controller (graphics card)

Removable media devices (storage)
-- CD
-- DVD
-- Blu-Ray
-- USB flash drive
-- Tape drive
Internal storage
-- Hard disc
-- Solid-state drive
-- RAID array controller

Sound card

Input:

Text input devices
-- Keyboard

Pointing devices
-- Mouse
-- Optical Mouse
-- Trackball

Gaming devices
-- Joystick
-- Gamepad
-- Game controller

Image, Video input devices
-- Image scanner
-- Webcam

Audio input devices
-- Microphone

Though this entry did not go into great detail about descriptions of all of this hardware, it provided links to other Wikipedia entries which talked about them in more depth. For someone like me who does not know a lot about how the technical side of computers work, it was effective in helping me understand a bit more about it. A lot of it I had always sort of overlooked as common knowledge, but it was nice to see everything categorized and listed together, along with links to more in-depth descriptions.

Moore's law
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law)

Moore’s Law basically states that since its invention in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. He stated this in 1965 and so far this trend has continued to this day, and though he doesn’t expect it to last forever, it is not expected to stop for at least another five years.

When you’re looking ahead to the future, it gets to the point where you wonder how much more things like this can improve - like for example, are we going to get to the point where we can store terabytes or more of information on a computer the size of an iPod? I have a hard time imagining what more can be done, but this trend has continued for so long and with such consistency that I also can’t really imagine it tapering off anytime soon. Progress is made in technology so continuously that we are always being surprised and impressed with its improvements.

The Computer History Museum
(http://www.computerhistory.org/)

I've always been fascinated with comparing modern things to items of the past, discovering their origins and seeing how much they've changed, so I found this website to be extremely interesting. A lot of the technical electrical jargon went over my head, but it was still interesting to see how everything progressed over the course of the years. I particularly enjoyed the timeline of computer storage history, and looking over all of the old models of computers from the 30s to the early 90s.