The Evolution of Hard Disk Bit Recording
Hard drive technology has continuously improved over the decades, that includes higher storage capacity performance. Part of this improvement has been higher access speeds, but most of the higher storage capacity has been the result of changes in the bit recording methods. More ...
Interrupt Request Lines (IRQs)
What happens when the CPU (Central Processor Unit) is busy doing something, like defragmenting the hard disk, and you press a key on the keyboard? An interrupt (IRQ) is a connection between a hardware device and the CPU. A hardware device uses it's assigned IRQ line to signal or interrupt the CPU when it needs attention. More ...
Online Color Coded Resistor Calculator
To determine the resistance value of a color-coded resistor, select the colors matching each band from the drop-down lists. More ...
Computer Video Display
If you view a computer as an input-processing-output machine, you can use a keyboard or removable storage device as the input, a program as the processing, but what can you use to retrieve the output? One way to acquire the output, be it text or graphics, is with a video display. More ...
Microprocessor Registers
To a large extent the operation of a microprocessor involves loading, transferring, and manipulating the contents of registers. In this article you learn about the functions, and purposes of the register set of the Intel 8086 microprocessor. More ...
Basic Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) Circuitry
One of the primary functions performed by a computer is mathematics. This article describes some of the logic circuits used to create the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of a microprocessor. More ...
Intel's Core 2 Processors
Intel's Core 2 processors, released in July of 2006, are based on the Core microarchitecture, a dual core design using a 65nm manufacturing process to put 291 million transistors on a 143 square mm die. Each core has its own 64KB L1 cache. The two cores share an L2 cache that can be either 2MB or 4MB. More ...
Capacitors in DC Circuits
A capacitor is a component that can be used to store an electrical charge. A capacitor can be used to create a timer. This time delay can be used to smooth a changing current flow in a circuit, or it can be used to absorb spikes and prevent false triggering of other components. More ...
Operating System Memory Management
Computers must keep several programs in memory, creating a need for memory management. Many different memory-management schemes are used. The operating system Keeps track of which parts of memory are currently being used, and moves data into out of memory, and allocates and deallocates memory as required. More ...
Intoduction to Digital Electronics
The entire field of computer technology relies on transistors. This article describes how transistors are constructed and how modern MOSFETs are combined to make digital logic circuits. More ...
Change Raspberry Pi Default Configuration
If you are a US user of the Raspberry Pi, you will discover that when you type, the characters displayed do not match our keyboard. When you type [shift][#] instead you get the British pound symbol. This is because Raspbian (and NOOBS) defaults to UK keyboard settings. More ...
How Computer Memory Works
Every program being executed and every piece of data being manipulated must be copied from a storage device, such as a magnetic disk, into main memory. It's important to understand the basic types of memory. More ...
