Transcript[]
Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby
Tim arrives home.
TIM: Oh boy! Can't wait to watch the new Hobbit movie while live-blogging my moment-to-moment reactions.
Tim races upstairs to his room.
TIM: Moby, I need my laptop and my-- Great Scott!
Moby has dismantled a computer and looks confused.
TIM: Ugh. Is the laptop in there?
Moby picks up a circuit board.
MOBY: Beep.
TIM: But, why?
Moby hands Tim a letter.
TIM: I should have known.
Tim reads from the typed letter.
TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, my phone can do pretty much everything my tablet and laptop can. What's the difference between all of this stuff? From, Megan. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap between these devices. From phones to desktops and everything in between, they're all personal computers.
Images show a phone, desktop, smart watch, laptop, and tablet.
TIM: That means they're designed for single users, and they can each do lots of different things.
MOBY: Beep?
TIM: The building block for all these machines is this little guy. It's a transistor, which is a special kind of electric switch.
An image shows a transistor.
TIM: Instead of an on and off position, transistors have low and high. These two positions can be used as a code to represent numbers, words, pictures, anything.
An animation shows the low and high positions. Images show a number, the word Tim, and a camera.
TIM: The code is called binary, and it's usually shown as 0s and 1s. Each 0 and 1 is known as a bit, the basic unit of binary information. It takes twenty-four bits to spell out "Tim."
An animation shows combinations of 0s and 1s to represent each letter of "Tim."
TIM: And about twenty-four million to encode a three-minute song.
MOBY: Beep?
TIM: Yup, but a computer's hardware contains billions of transistors! So it can easily process that information.
An animation shows rows of transistors.
MOBY: Beep?
TIM: Hardware is all this stuff, the physical components of a computer. The programs and files are called software.
Side by side images show hardware components like memory chips and a motherboard and software icons like video, audio, apps, files, and games.
TIM: Software is basically lists of instructions telling all those transistors what to do.
An animation shows a transistor surrounded by binary code.
TIM: To follow the instructions, all computers use the same basic hardware setup. First, they need processors, the brains of the operation. Processors interpret the instructions from the software. Computers need memory, to store software and keep track of open files. Input devices like keyboards and mice let us interact with the software. And output devices like monitors and printers show us what the software is up to.
Images show processors, memory chips, and input and output devices as Tim describes them.
Moby holds a motherboard.
MOBY: Beep?
TIM: Yup, all that hardware is connected through the motherboard.
Animations show the parts of the motherboard as Tim describes them.
TIM: It holds the main components of a computer in place. The printed metal pathways wire the hardware into one big circuit. Plug in a keyboard or a monitor, and they become part of that circuit.
An image shows a keyboard and monitor plugged into the motherboard.
MOBY: Beep.
TIM: Well those are just the main components. Everything you do on a computer depends on these and many smaller pieces working in harmony.
An image highlights different parts of the computer working together.
TIM: To coordinate all that action, you need an operating system. It's like a master program for your whole computer. It's always on, managing the interactions between hardware and software.
An animation shows a music conductor wearing the initials "OS" for operating system. He has a baton and he is conducting the parts of the computer.
MOBY: Beep.
An image shows a tablet screen.
TIM: Well, say you hadn't destroyed our tablet, and I wanted to watch a movie. When you open the file, you're sending a message to your operating system.
Tim taps an icon to open a program. An image shows the OS conductor answering a phone call.
TIM: This message says, launch the movie player app and cue up the movie. To do that, the operating system calls on the central processing unit, or CPU.
The CPU, in the form of a person with a brain-like head, answers the phone. The OS and CPU have a conversation as Tim explains their functions.
TIM: The CPU is the main processor: pretty much every instruction goes through it. To launch the movie player, the CPU calls on the computer's storage.
An animation shows the CPU driving to a place with storage lockers.
TIM: That's a memory module where all the programs and files live. The movie and the app are there, but they have to be copied to a different kind of memory to work.
MOBY: Beep?
TIM: It's not so complicated. Think of storage as, well, storage.
The CPU opens a door to a storage locker full of boxes.
TIM: All your files are there, but they're packed away to save space. Anytime you want to use something, it needs to be unpacked.
The CPU loads the "Hobbit" and "Movie Player" boxes onto his truck and drives away.
TIM: That way, your computer can read the information inside.
MOBY: Beep?
TIM: The unpacking happens in a different memory component. It's called random access memory, or RAM.
An image shows the RAM Theater and there are movie posters on the building. The marquee says, "Now Playing," and there are icons for program files like a weather app, Microsoft Word, and the BrainPOP site.
TIM: RAM is what your computer is thinking about at any given moment. It's kind of like short-term memory. It's much smaller than storage, and it's wiped clean when you turn the computer off.
An animation shows the CPU driving by the theater, then carrying the boxes marked "Hobbit" and "Movie Player" into the RAM Theater.
TIM: It's also faster than storage: it can skip around almost instantly inside any open file.
The CPU is holding a movie projector. There are 1s and 0s moving up from the open boxes and into the projector. The code speeds up, and they come out of the projector very quickly.
TIM: That's why you can scroll down a webpage or scrub through a movie without any delay.
An animation shows scrolling through a movie.
MOBY: Beep.
TIM: Once the movie is unpacked, the CPU gets help from other processors. It gives some of the data to the graphics chip, which translates it into images. And the sound chip interprets audio data for the computer's speakers. All of this happens in a fraction of a second.
An animation shows the CPU distributing data to the other processors from his video projector. Images illustrate what Tim describes.
TIM: Watching the movie, you'd never guess that millions of bits are being moved around and processed every moment. That's why processors have to be so fast.
MOBY: Beep?
An image shows a microchip, or processor, that reads 2.2 gigahertz.
TIM: Their speed is measured in hertz: how many instructions they can execute per second. Today's CPUs perform in the gigahertz: billions of instructions per second.
MOBY: Beep.
TIM: That is pretty fast, but our computers run a lot of software.
Moby fumbles through the pile of hardware components from the computer he took apart.
MOBY: Beep.
Moby smashes two components in an attempt to put them back together.
TIM: Or at least, they used to.
Tim sighs.