Computer Fundamentals Study Guide

Hardware

• Von Neumann architecture: CPU, memory, I/O via shared bus.
• Moore's Law: transistor count doubles approx every 2 years.
• ISA: defines supported instructions, registers, addressing modes.
• Memory hierarchy: registers, cache, RAM, secondary storage.

Software & Systems

• Operating system kernel: manages resources, provides system calls.
• File system hierarchy: tree structure, mount points.
• Compiler vs interpreter: translation vs execution.

Data & Algorithms

• Binary representation: bits, bytes, word size.
• Big O notation: describes asymptotic upper bound.
• TCP/IP model: 4 layers (Link, Internet, Transport, Application).
• Encryption basics: symmetric vs asymmetric, key exchange.

Key Concepts

• Von Neumann bottleneck
• Parallelism
• Virtual memory
• Deadlock