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- The personal computer, or PC for short, is usually made up of three
- components, namely the keyboard, monitor and 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. Computers are 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.
-