Unit 6 Lab 1
Computer Abstraction Hierarchy
Abstraction Inside the Computer
In this section, you will learn get an overview of three groups (domains) of levels of abstraction.
Vocabulary
Click each word to view the definition.
Digital
Digital means information that is represented as ones and zeros.
Analog
Analog means information that is represented by signals that vary continuously (that is, including in-between values).
The Software Domain: Applications
In this section, you'll explore some of the many purposes for which people use software applications.
The Software Domain: Programming Languages
In this section, you will consider why there are different programming languages and look at some of the ways that languages differ.
The Software Domain: Libraries
In this section, you'll learn that a library is a package of procedures written by other programmers that helps solve a problem
Vocabulary
Click each word to view the definition.
Software Library
A software library is a package of procedures that you can import into your program. A library is a kind of abstraction: you don't have to know any of the details of how it's coded. You can build libraries yourself, or you can use one that someone else wrote.
The Software Domain: Operating Systems
On the first section, you'll learn about the software that directly manages the computer's hardware, the operating system.
The Digital Domain: Architecture
In this section, we shift from software to hardware, starting with the architecture, which is essentially the hardware as it looks to the software.
Vocabulary
Click each word to view the definition.
Machine Language
Machine language is the lowest-level programming language; it is directly understood by the computer hardware.
Architecture
Architecture is an abstraction, a specification of the machine language. It also tells how the processor connects to the memory. It doesn't specify the circuitry; the same architecture can be built as circuitry in many different ways.
The Digital Domain: Components
In this section, you'll explore the parts (components) of the computer hardware.
The Digital Domain: Integrated Circuits
In this section, you'll learn about the physical electronic devices inside the computer: integrated circuits.
Vocabulary
Click each word to view the definition.
Integrated Circuit (IC)
An integrated circuit ("IC" or "chip") is a single physical device that contains millions or billions of basic electrical parts. A processor is an IC, but not all processors are IC; there are also special-purpose chips inside a computer.