Chapter 2

Taylor Berge

This chapter talked about computer architecture, machine language, program executions, and instructions. We learned about the central processing unit and all of the units inside of it that connect to the main memory. We learned about how computers read and decode instructions that we give it and execute these tasks. I understand this chapter a lot more than Chapter 1, because we actually got to work with data manipulation in lab. We were able to write and adjust codes ourselves the way that computers would read them. This particular lab lasted more than three hours and we changed the codes to alter 4 pictures. That is a long time to be dealing with only 4 pictures. The amazing thing is that computers can deal with tons of these all at the same time. It uses the fetch/ execute cycle to decode the instructions we give it, so that all we have to do is click a few buttons. At Hope, we are given instructions by teachers and coaches, we think about them, and then we execute them- just the way computers read the binary codes we tell it. We run several programs at the same time at Hope, such as our emails, Word documents, Moodle, Dyno, Facebook, or YouTube. The computer takes all of the information in these programs, decodes it, executes it, and can store it using the fetch/ execute cycle in the blink of an eye. This would take us an unbelievable amount of time to process. The computer can do these jobs so much faster, especially when it can use pipelining and dual cores to process more than one thing at once.