Lecture Post: Hardware

True Tennis Live is a type of electronic tennis court that tells the players if a ball lands in or out of the boundary lines. This type of technology is needed for all average level tennis players when they are competing because it is always debatable where the ball lands.

A recent topic that we discussed in IST 195 was hardware and all of their functions in the computer. Computer hardware is all of the physical components and guts on the inside. Technology has changed rapidly over many decades. Back in the day a 100 megabyte drive used to be around $3,500. However, today we can get a 3 terabyte drive for as little as $150. That is more than 20 million bytes for a lot less money!

The system unit contains various pieces of hardware that are necessary for the computer to work and run properly. Of course when building a computer, it depends on the user on how much they want to spend on certain products. The main components required include: a motherboard, drive bay, processor, memory, power supply, sound/video card, and RAM. There are many other accessories needed to run a computer but this depends on how skilled the user is and how much they want to get out of the machine.

When a tyro is looking at the inside of a computer everything looks to be really scary and overwhelming. But it is actually possible to build your own computer from scratch. This could become a time consuming process for some, but for experts it can be done in a couple hours. However, when in the process, the builder must be very careful to have nothing connected to any source of power giving it electricity because there is a high possibility of getting shocked. Only when every component is hooked up correctly and you are sure it will start up right should the builder turn it on. This lecture gave me a lot of insight on hardware and actually taught me certain details of the computer I have never heard of. I realized from this lecture that I would need a good a graphics card for the computers on the tennis courts so that they run properly and are efficient for the user.