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- The personal computer, or PC for short, is usually made up of 3 components,
- namely the keyboard, the monitor and the central processing unit. It is the
- system or mother board in the CPU which forms the "brains" of the computer.
- On this circuit card assembly will be found various memory ICs such as prom
- or eprom for the firmware, dynamic ram for the main memory and static ram for
- the cache. The prom is non-volatile storage for the BIOS code which forms the
- interface between the hardware registers and the operating system. The cache
- consists of high speed static ram which holds the currently accessed area of
- memory. The computer is controlled by programs collectively known as software.
- Programs can be written using a variety of languages ranging from low level
- hexadecimal machine code to 4th generation program generators.
-