Page 7 - gyamfi series vol. 2

INFORMATION AND COMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY GYAMFI SERIES
servers, workstations, and personal computers. The term originally referred to the large cabinets called
"main frames" that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Later, the
term was used to distinguish high-end commercial machines from less powerful units. Most large-scale
computer system architectures were established in the 1960s, but continue to evolve. Mainframe
computers are often used as servers
 Supercomputers: they process complex scientific applications and are used in meteorological
analysis, aircraft design and complex structural engineering. They are expensive, powerful, largest and
faster as compared to the other types of computers. A
supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-
purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-
point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
THE MAIN COMPONENTS OF A COMPUTER.
There are only two main components of a computer, namely;
◊ Hardware
◊ Software
HARDWARE
Computer hardware is the physical component of computer that we can see, touch and feel. Examples
of computer hardware are; mouse, keyboard, system unit, monitor, printer, hard disk etc.
Basic functions of hardware components
1. System unit is a unit which contains or house the central processing unit to process the data fed into
the computer to become information.
Note; most people refer to the system unit as the CPU, but they are two different things. The CPU is
found inside the system unit. The system unit and the CPU are like the head and the brain. The brain is
found inside the head but not the same as the head.

INSIDE THE SYSTEM UNIT

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