(rock music) - Hi, my name is Madison Maxey. I have a company called
Loomia, and we focus on making smart fabrics for smart clothing and smart soft-good products. The sky's the limit when
it comes to textiles. - My name is Danielle Applestone, and I'm CEO of Other Machine Copmany. We build a desktop milling machine. A milling machine takes
a rotating cutting tool and moves it through material
to create a 3-D object. - Under the hood, all computers do the same four basic things. They input information, store, and process the information, and
then output information. Each of these things is done by a different part of the computer. There are input devices that
take input from the outside world and convert it
into binary information. There's memory to store this information. There's a central processing unit, or CPU, where all the calculations are done. And finally, there are output devices that take information and
convert it into physical output. - [Danielle] Let's talk about input first. Computers can take many
different types of input, like the keyboard of a computer,
the touch pad of a phone, a camera, a microphone, or a GPS, but even the sensors
on a car, a thermostat, or a drone are also
different input devices. Now, let's look at a simple
example of how input travels through a computer and becomes output. When you press a key on your keyboard, let's say the letter B, the keyboard converts the letter to a number. That number is sent as binary, ones and zeros, into the computer. Starting from this
number, the CPU calculates how to display the
letter B pixel-by-pixel. The CPU requests step-by-step
instructions from memory, which tell it how to draw the letter B. The CPU runs these instructions and stores the results
as pixels in memory. Finally, this pixel information is sent in binary to the screen. The screen is an output
device, which converts the binary signals into the tiny lights and colors that make up what you see. - This all happens so quickly
it feels instantaneous, but to display each letter,
a computer runs thousands of instructions, starting from the moment your finger presses the keyboard. - In that example, the
output device was the screen, but there are many
different types of output, which take a binary
signal from the computer and do something in the physical world. For example, a speaker will play sound and a 3-D printer will print an object. Output devices can also
control physical motion, like a robotic arm, the motor
of a car, or the cutting tool of the milling machine
that my company makes. New types of inputs and
outputs let computers interact with the world
in entirely new ways. This has been helped out by improvements to the speed and size
of the memory and CPU. The more complicated
a task is and the more information that's input or
output, the more processing power and memory a computer needs. Typing letters on a screen may be easy, but to do complicated
3-D graphics or record a high-definition movie, modern computers often have multiple CPUs to
process all that information, and many gigabits of memory to store it. - No matter what it is you
want to do with a computer, every single action is about inputting information from the physical world, storing and processing that information, and getting some output back
into the physical world.