lecture notes

General purpose machine / universal computer

hardware -- physical components of the computer
software -- instructions (a type of data)

pass info from one component in von Neumann architecture to another via the bus


1) First, my program sits on the hard drive
2) Double click on it, it is copied to RAM
3) Point the IP (instruction pointer) to the beginning of the computer program.
4) fetch-execute cycle
a) fetch
b) execute
c) fetch
d) execute

a loop

algorithm: recipe. a set of instructions one can follow to solve some problem.

RAM: short term memory.
RAM: stands for Random Access Memory
as opposed to - sequential access memory
Random Access Memory means that you can get to any random slot in memory in about equal time.

RAM is much more expensive than Hard Drives.
500 GB of HD space
But, only 4 GB of RAM