Explore how computer systems store, manipulate, and convert various data types like text, images, and videos through integrated software and hardware. Gain insights into accessible data representation.

Computer systems do not understand human instructions, nor can they perceive real-life data in its raw form. Therefore, computer systems require a way to store and represent information in an accessible way. They use software and hardware components combined to help retrieve information, store it, manipulate it, and convert it back to a human-accessible format. If you want to learn how computer systems perform complex tasks such as storing and manipulating textual data, videos, music, images of your cat, and much more, this course is meant for you.

Information Representation in Computer Systems

The block diagram of a Von Neumann computer is shown in the figure. We can see four constituent blocks:

* Input unit

* Output unit

* Storage unit

* Central Processing Unit.

All four of these units are made up of physical gadgets that combine together to give you a computer system.


The input unit takes an input from the real world or an input device and converts that data into streams of bytes. Some of the common input devices include a keyboard, mouse, microphone, camera, and universal serial bus (USB), as shown in the figure.

>**Recall**: 1 byte = 8 bits.

In this lesson, you will learn about the hardware components of a computer system.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

Hardware Components of a Computer

The Von Neumann architecture

Input and output units