What makes a computer, a computer?

[Music] my name is mainly ku and I'm a designer and an inventor so some of the things I've designed have been at Apple and now I design products for kids to use so that they can have an easier time in school my other jobs include DJing and dancing computers are everywhere they're in people's pockets they're in people's cars will have them on their wrists they might be in your backpack right now but what makes a computer a computer what does make a computer a computer anyway and how does it even work [Music] hi I'm NAT I was one of the original designers of the Xbox I've been working with computers since I was maybe seven years old and now I work on virtual reality as humans we've always built tools to help us solve problems tools like a wheelbarrow a hammer or a printing press or a tractor trailer all of these inventions helped us with manual work over time people began to wonder if a machine could be designed and built to help us with the thinking work we do like solving equations or tracking the stars in the sky rather than moving or manipulating physical things like dirt and stone these machines would need to be designed to manipulate information as the pioneers of computer science explored how to design a thinking machine they realized that it had to perform four different tasks it would need to take input store information process it and then output the results now this might sound simple but these four things are common to all computers that's what makes a computer a computer the earliest computers were made out of wood and metal with mechanical levers and gears by the 20th century though computers started using electrical components these early computers were really large and really slow a computer the size of a room might take hours just to do a basic math problem these machines are things of gleaming very colored metal and numerous flashing lights computers started out as basic calculators which was already really awesome at the time and they were only manipulating numbers back then but now we can use them to talk to each other we can use them to play games control robots and do any crazy thing that you could probably imagine modern computers look nothing like those clunky old machines but they still do these same four things first we're going to talk about input this is my favorite because what input is is the stuff that the world does or that you do that makes the computer do stuff you can tell computers what to do with the keyboard you can tell them what to do with the mouse the microphone the camera and now if you're wearing a computer on your wrist it might listen to your heartbeat or in your car it might be listening to what the car is doing and a touchscreen can actually sense your finger and it takes that as input on what it's doing all these different inputs give a computer information which is then stored in memory a computer's processor takes information from memory it manipulates it or changes it using an algorithm which is just a series of commands and then it sends the processed information back to be stored in memory again this continues until the processed information is ready to be output [Music] how a computer outputs information depends on what the computer is designed to do a computer display can show text photos videos or interactive games even virtual reality the output of a computer may even include signals to control a robot and when computers connect over the Internet the output from one computer becomes the input to another and vice versa the computers we use today look really different from the earliest thinking machines and who knows what the computers of tomorrow will be like my hope is that you get to help decide what you want the computers of tomorrow to look like but across all computers regardless of the different types of technology they use they're always those doing the same for things they take in information they store it as data they process it and then they output the results you [Music] you