An Analogy to Explain Computers to Novices

Imagine that the inside of you computer is an office cubicle. The office cubicle has a few items of interest. In the office sits a desk, a file cabinet, an office worker seated in a chair, and a special fax machine. First of all, the file cabinet represents your hard drive. This is where all information is stored. The desk represents the memory or RAM of your computer. This is where all the files currently in use are at. Next, the office worker represents the CPU of your computer. He is the one that does all the real work around here. And lastly, the special fax machine represnts a graphics card. When the boss needs to see something, the worker puts a paper on the fax machine and it comes out on the other end of the line as a picture.

Lets say for example that you as the computer user have just started your computer. This would be represented by the office working wheeling over to the file cabinet and pulling out all the files which are your operating system and laying them out on the desk. Then you open up some programs, like an internet browser and Word. Pretty soon, the worker is running out of space on the desk. How can we solve this problem? Get him a bigger desk, which in the case of a real computer, means more memory.

Now let us pretend that you are using your computer to make some complex calculations. The office worker doesn't need lots of desk space for this, but giving him a partner to help with his math problems would sure help. This would translate in computer terms to a dual core processor. Another thing that could help him work his math problem faster is making his hands move faster. The faster he can write (we assume that he is working out the math by hand), the faster he can finish the problem. In computer terms, faster hands means higher clock speeds (more Gigahertz or GHz).

For this next example, let us assume that a computer user is playing a video game. Video games require a good graphics card capable of processing many frames per second. In the office example, the special fax machine takes plain text documents and converts them into pictures on the other side. The office worker has to write lots of words on paper and send them through the fax machine. That is not a problem, since the office worker is a very fast writer. The problem is that the fax machine only scans 3 pages per minute, which is too slow for the guy that has to receive the faxes. To improve number of pages per minute he can send, the office worker need to get a better fax machine. This translates to a better video card that can render more frames per second.

The last item in the office, the file cabinet, which represents the hard drive, is the simplest. All data is stored on it, and the more data you have on it, the fuller it gets. The data on a hard drive is organized the same way it is in a file cabinet, into files and folders. If you want to store more stuff on the hard drive, you get a bigger one. Files on a hard drive represent the actual data, whereas the folders are merely a way of organizing that data.

I hope this is an informative article for the less technically savvy readers, and for the more technically competent, a better analogy to explain computers to your less technically knowledgeable friends and family.