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Computer Concepts and C Language

-Prof. Niranjan N.Chiplunkar
What is a Computer?
Data is very important for business, science, research etc. As the volume of data is
increasing , manual maintenance of this data is really challenging. Moreover, most tasks
demand accuracy and the speed in data processing and reporting. Thus a powerful tool to
carryout the task of storing, processing and reporting has evolved which is called a
Computer

Computer is an electronic device used to store, retrieve and process data.

Data is unprocessed facts, figures and statistics. Information is the meaningful output of
processed data. To convert raw data into useful information there is a standard process.
To carry out this process, a finite and ordered set of instructions are needed.

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Computers can be classified as digital, analog and hybrid computers based on the
technology on which they are built. Analog computers are normally built using
Operational Amplifiers. Digital computers are built using digital logic gates . Hybrid
computers will have mix of analog and digital components.

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First generation digital computers were built using vacuum tubes. They were very
slow, had very small memory capacity and used to occupy a large space. Second
generation computers used transistors. Third generation computers used Integrated
circuits(IC). As there was tremendous progress in the IC technology, VLSI (very large
Scale Integration Circuits) chips became very common and present day computers are
built using VLSI chips. Microprocessors which are the heart of the digital computer are
built using VLSI chips. Intel is one of the important manufacturer of the microprocessor
chips and Pentium is the family of recent microprocessors which are used as the CPUs of
present day computers.

Based on the size and capability, digital computers are also classified as
Mainframe computers, Mini computers and microcomputers. Super computers are the
ones which have tremendous processing power, memory capacity and work very fast.
Several microprocessors are interconnected to carry out complex task in less time. PC is
the acronym used for Personal Computers. Present day PCs are very powerful and their
processors will have several cores of execution units. These are called multi core
processor chips.
Multi core is the recent technology in processors where more than one core of
central processing unit is made available on a single microprocessor chip. The multiple
cores execute different portions of the application program simultaneously and thus
improving the performance of the system. If there are two cores on a microprocessor chip
then it is called dual core processor.
Hardware Components of a Digital Computer:
Processor, Input/Output devices, and memory are the important components of a
digital computer. Processor will have ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) and Control

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Unit(CU) as its components. Memory can be subdivided into primary and secondary
memory.
Processor is responsible for fetching and executing program instructions. Memory
is where data and program are stored. If there is no distinction between data and program
memory and if memory is separate from that of CPU then it is called Von Neumann
architecture (Harvard architecture is one where there is separate storage for program and
data and separate pathways to connect to them). Stored program digital computer is one
which stores both program and data in a read-write random access memory. Von
Neumann and stored program are two terminologies which are normally used
interchangeably.

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Main

Cache

Registers

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Secondary

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Memory

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In the memory, the information is stored in terms of bits or bytes or words. Byte is
made of 8 bits and word is a collection of 16, 32 or 64 bits. Memory can be volatile or
non volatile. Information present in Volatile memory is lost as soon as the power is
turned off. Figure-1 gives the classification of memory devices in a digital computer.

ROM

Internal

External

Figure-1: Classification of Memory

RAM

Secondary memories are non volatile in nature. Examples of secondary memory

include Hard disk, Pen drive, DVD-ROM, Recordable DVD,CD-RW, Blue-Ray,
Magnetic tapes. Main memory devices are ones in which any memory location can be
accessed in any order (not necessarily in a sequential order). RAM (Random Access
Memory) and ROM(Read Only Memory) are the two types of main memory devices.
RAM is also called Read-Write Memory. It is volatile memory. ROM is non-volatile
memory. It is also considered an example of firmware.
Cache memory is a memory placed between CPU and main memory. It contains a part
of main memory content. Processor when needs some information, first looks in the
cache. If not found in cache, the portion of memory containing the needed information is
moved to the cache and is also read by the processor. Both internal and external cache

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memories are volatile in nature. External cache is mounted on the motherboard. Registers
are small memory units internally available within the processor.
Input devices accept data and control signals from the user. Output devices
communicate the processed data to the user. Examples of input devices are keyboard,
mouse, pen based systems, data scanners, game controllers, voice recognition systems
etc. Examples of output devices are Monitor, Printer, Plotter, sound system etc.
Central Processing Unit (CPU) -It is the brain of the computer. It performs the bulk of
the data processing operations. The function of the processor is to fetch the instruction
from memory, examine (decode) the instruction and execute the instructions. It consists
of Control unit, Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) and registers. Control unit is responsible
for fetching the instructions from memory and interpreting them. ALU performs
arithmetic and logical operations. Registers are very high speed memory units
for storing very small amount of data. Program counter, Instruction register, Memory
address register, memory buffer register and accumulator are some examples of registers.
Bus is a collection of wires. They may be unidirectional or bidirectional. Bus is used
to connect different parts of a computer. Bus may be serial or parallel. USB is an
example of a serial bus. Bus connecting computer and a dot matrix printer is normally
a parallel bus. Parallel bus carries several bits at a time. These bits may indicate
instruction, data, address or commands. Bus width and Bus speed are the two major
components for performance measure of a computer.

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Software
Collection of computer programs, procedures and documentation that perform some
tasks on a computer is called software. Software can be categorized as application
software and system software. -Application software is developed to solve a specific
problem. Examples: Notepad, Wordpad, Microsoft excel, MSAccess etc.. System
software provides a convenient environment for program development and execution.
Examples: Operating system, assemblers, compilers, interpreters, loaders and linkers
etc.
Compiler converts a high level program to a binary level program called object code.
Interpreter also does the same thing, but line by line and it also executes the line of code.

Operating system is responsible for the management of resources of computer. Examples

of Operating system: DOS,Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac, Solaris, AIX etc DOS (Disk
Operating System) is a single user O.S., Unix is a multi user operating system. Windows
is multitasking operating system. Linux is a free Unix like operating system. Various
versions of Windows operating systems have been released by Microsoft like Windows95, Windows-98,Windows Me, Windows-XP, Windows-Vista, Windows-2003 etc. Unix
O.S. was developed by AT&T Bell Labs and comes either as AT&T Unix or BSD Unix.
Linux operating system comes in various distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora,redhat etc.
Mac O.S. is from Apple company and Solaris is from Sun Microsystems.
Networking
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of
computers and devices connected by communication channels that facilitates
communications among users and allows users to share resources with other users.

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Facilitating Communications, Sharing hardware, sharing files, data and information,

sharing software are some of the purposes of Computer network. Computer network can
be either Wired and Wireless. Wired networks use twisted pairs, coaxial cable or optical
fibre connections. Wireless devices use radio waves or infra red signals for the
communication in the free space. A local area network (LAN) is a network that connects
computers and devices in a limited geographical area such as home, school, computer
laboratory, office building, or closely positioned group of buildings. WAN (Wide Area
Network), Campus Network, Enterprise network are other terms used depending on the
size of the network. Internet is a Network of Networks at a global level.
The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a product of the Open
Systems Interconnection effort at the International Organization for Standardization. It is
a way of sub-dividing a communications system into smaller parts called layers. A layer
is a collection of conceptually similar functions that provide services to the layer above it
and receives services from the layer below it. Physical, Data link, Network, Transport,
Session, Presentation and Application layers are the seven layers (from bottom to top) of
OSI reference model

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Computing Environments
There are various computing environments depending on the way in which the
computers are used in an application. Personal Computing Environment is a Single user
system . In Time Sharing Environment, all computing is done by the central computer.
Client Server Environment will have single Server and several clients. Distributed
Computing Environment (Eg: e-Bay auction service on the internet) uses several servers
and clients.

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Types of Programming
A computer program can be written in either High level programming language or
assembly language or machine language. While High level language is comparatively
easy to use, Machine language is most difficult. BASIC, FORTRAN, C, Pascal, C++,
JAVA, C#, Visual Basic etc. are examples of High level languages. Machine language is
made up of 1s and 0s. Assembly language is made of mnemonics and has complexity in
between the high level and machine level languages.
Typical programs are written in sequential manner. This means that, the order of
execution of instructions is same as the order in which the instructions are written.
Control statements define the flow of program. In the recent multicore processors, to
extract the full benefit of the architecture, we need to write multithreaded parallel
programs. This can be done using OpenMP pragmas in the C (or FORTRAN) programs.
Parallel multithreaded programs also can be written using pthreads and MPI (Message
Passing Interface).
A program can be designed in a top-down or bottom-up fashion. Procedure oriented
languages like Pascal and C help us in writing top-down modular programs. Object
oriented languages like C++ and Java are useful in writing bottom-up programs.
A Computer Program is a series of steps specified for the solution to a problem, which a
computer can understand and execute. A software application is a collection of computer
program which address a real life problem for its end users. A software project is an
undertaking to create a software application by writing computer programs.

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Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

The different steps followed in the development of a software project define the
software development life cycle. Very popular model is called water fall model, which
has steps like requirement gathering, analysis, design, coding , testing , implementation
and maintenance.
Software engineering (SE) is a profession dedicated to designing, implementing, and
modifying software so that it is of higher quality, more affordable, maintainable, and
faster to build. As per the software engineering principles, we need to properly design the
code before writing it, document the code, use standard coding practices, use proper
comments in the code, test the code thoroughly, use version controls and write reusable
code .

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Algorithm, Pseudo Code and Flowchart

Algorithm is a finite set of steps to accomplish a task. An algorithm must be finite,
definite , effective, with zero or more inputs and with one or more outputs. Pseudo code
is English like representation of an algorithm. It is good for a large problem. An
algorithm is independent of any language or machine whereas a program is dependent on
a language and machine. To fill the gap between the program and the algorithm, we need
the pseudo code.
Flowchart is a pictorial representation of an algorithm or computation. It is Good for
small problems. Flowchart is an organized combination of shapes , lines and text that
graphically illustrates a process or structure. Several symbols are used in the flowchart
like input box, output box, assignment box, decision box, connection symbol etc. Raptor
is a flowchart based programming tool. Raptor stands for Rapid Algorithmic
Prototyping Tool for Ordered Reasoning. It is a free tool which can be downloaded
from the website http://raptor.martincarlisle.com
In the software development, errors may creep in at different stages. There could be
errors in the algorithm design phase itself. Errors may get detected while compiling the
program, which are called syntax errors. The errors which may get detected while
executing the program are called run time errors. It is always essential to write error free
programs.
Reference: Vikas Gupta- Computer Concepts and C Programming, Dreamtech Press

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