CIOS 110 Lesson 1

I must admit to being a bit uneasy about the course after working on this first assignment. Students were directed to www.webopedia.com and instructed to use the "By Keyword" search box to find information on processors. Now, maybe my painfully slow dial-up connection is failing to load the page properly (we'll find out when the DSL gets hooked up this week), but there is only one search box, and no way to set it to a "Keyword" option. Furthermore, the sheer number of ads on the page would make it difficult for anyone just learning their way around computers (and isn't that ostensibly the point of this course?) to determine what is fact and what is a sales pitch.

With those concerns voiced, let's focus on the processor. I'll be frank that I often bandy about terms which I am not able to actually define. I found that this article explained a lot of those things. For instance, it's simple math to me that the higher numbers for bandwidth and speed mean a faster (and theoretically better) computer. After reading the article, though, I understood what each number rperesents and why they are important for the speed of the computer. Two new terms for me were RISC (a processor that recognizes a limited number of instructions. The limited number of instructions means the computer can operate at a higher speed. I'd liken it to using a basic calculator for simple addition versus using a scientific calculator. Do you really need all those bells and whistles if you're just adding?) and CISC (a processor which supports a much higher number of instructions. The article indicated a high end of 200 instructions.).