Computers & Memory

Characteristics of Computers & Memory

Characteristics of Computers

The vital characteristics of the computer are as follows:

I. Speed Computer works on electrical pulses, which travel at incredible speeds and, because the computer is electronic device, its internal speed is instantaneous.

An arithmetic calculation can be performed in a thousandth, millionth, billionth or even in a trillionth of second. It is capable of executing over ten thousand instructions in a second.

MILLISEC ms = 1/1000 of second.

MICROSEC ms = 1/1,000,000 of second

NANOSEC ns = 1/1,000,000,000 of second

PICOSEC ps = 1/1,000,000,000,000 of second

II. Storage This is a very vital characteristic of the computer, which separates it from rest of the machines. The smallest unit of storage is bit (acronym of Binary Digit).

The speed with which a computer can perform, i.e. to input data and the instructions for processing, is humanly impossible. The storage space available in the Central Processing Unit, being limited, large quantity of data and entire instructions of all the required programs cannot be stored in it. These are stored outside and read into the memory of CPU at the time of processing..

BIT the smallest unit of storage,

NIBBLE=4 bits,

BYTE=8 bits,

KB= 1024 bytes,

MB 1024 KB,

GB-1024 MB

III. Accuracy Accuracy of computers is consistently high. Errors in computing are due to machinery failure, imprecise programming logic, inaccurate data, poorly designed systems. Precision is the degree of accuracy to which the computer gives the result. The precision of computers is phenomenal and unquestionable.

BITS, BYTES and THEIR LIKELY SIZE (IN WORDS)
UNIT	SIZE	DESCRIPTION
Bit	One Binary Digit	Stores either a Binary 0 or 1
Byte	Eight bits	One character
Word	16 to 64 bits	One character
Kilobyte	1 thousand bytes	About one page of double spaced text
Megabyte	1 million bytes	About the size of a short book
Gigabyte	1 billion bytes	About the size of 1000 short books
Terabyte	1 trillion bytes	About the size of an entire library
Petabyte	1 quadrilion bytes	Just about all the libraries inthe country

IV. Versatility Computers seem capable of performing almost any task, provided the task can be reduced to series of logical steps. It performs numeric and non-numeric tasks equally well. An algorithm, a step-by-step procedure which applied to the problem leads to solution. Programming is to convert these step-by-step procedures as a set of instructions in computer language to solve the problem.

V. Automation Once a program is in the computer's memory, CPU follows the instructions until it meets the last instruction. Once the process had begun, it would continue without human intervention until completion.

VI. Diligence Being a machine, a computer does not suffer from the human traits of tiredness and lack of concentration. If three million calculations are to be performed, computer performs all these calculations with the same speed and accuracy.

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