Systems 

Systems – GCSE Computer Science Revision, Technology has developed at such speed over the last ten to twenty years that computers have become portable, we’re saving data in clouds and we’re ordering pizza online and having it delivered. It’s inevitable that computer systems will develop even further. Anything is possible. Within ten short years we may be using nothing more than speech and an even more advanced version of Google glass to conduct business and manage our lives and homes.

Computers control so much of our day to day life that it’s easy to forget quite how much we rely on them. They run things like washing machines, self-service tills, petrol pumps, buying cinema tickets with a card and borrowing books at the library. Then there are the systems that we need to rely on for our physical safety, like aeroplanes, intensive care machines and nuclear power stations.

So, the range of computing systems available to us is enormous. A few decades ago we had a large computer taking up most of the space on a desk, and now we have iPhones, games consoles and laptops, and desktop computers are now streamlined with thin screens and laser-driven mice.

All these computer systems have four functions: input, processing, storage and output, all of which are essential to using computing systems as means of communication.

Let’s look at input. Which parts of a computer system might come under the heading of input? Well there’s the keyboard of course, and possibly a mouse, unless you use a touchscreen on an iPhone or a touchpad on a laptop. Perhaps you’ve got a microphone for dubbing videos and a scanner that can transfer the image of a document or a photograph into the computer.

Processing is the running of the computer, or how it works as a system, in the same kind of way that, and handles all the tasks a system has to do. Think of it as the engine room.

You need storage space for all the data, so that’s a filing cabinet with all its files and separate sections that keep all the data.

Finally there’s output. Output is everything that results from the tasks you ask the programme to do, and that can be the characters displayed on a monitor, the hard copy printed from a digital document, or the communication via a modem or a network if you’re linked in to other computers and able to share files from the same directories.