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Computer Facts for Kids

This web page contains computer facts for kids and is an excellent resource for anyone of any age looking to learn about personal computers. Our goal is to provide you with accurate, up to date facts about PCs. In addition to facts about computers, we provide additional resources to help you with your research on this amazing invention.

The computer facts below will help you learn about who invented the first computer, how a computer works, the different types of computers, how computers changed the world and other computer related facts. We hope these computer facts are interesting and help you learn more about this revolutionary invention.

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22 Computer Facts for Kids

  1. A computer is a machine that can be programmed to complete both simple and complex tasks.
  2. Alan Turing presented the first idea of the modern computer in 1936 in his paper "On Computable Numbers".
  3. The first digital computer was Colossus and it was built between 1934 and 1945 by British codebreakers.
  4. The first digital computer built in the United States of America was ENIC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) in 1945.
  5. The first personal computer was the Kenbak-1, it was an 8-bit machine with 256 bytes of memory and was created by John Blankenbaker and the Kenbak Corporation in 1970.
  6. The first personal computer that was built and sold exclusively for home users was the Apple II. The Apple II was designed by primarily by Steve Wozniak with assistance from Steve Jobs and Rod Holt.
  7. There are many different types of computers, including but not limited to personal computers, workstations, mainframe computers and supercomputers. Smartphones and tablets are also classified as a computer.
  8. A personal computer is a computer that is used for personal use in the home.
  9. A workstation is a computer used by businesses and educators for design, technical and scientific purposes.
  10. A mainframe is a computer used by businesses for large data processing and other critical applications.
  11. A supercomputer is a computer that can operate at a very high level and reaches performance levels that are vastly greater than general-purpose computers.
  12. A computer is generally made up of a CPU, motherboard, memory (RAM) and storage. If a computer’s motherboard doesn’t have integrated graphics and sound it would also have a sound card and a graphics card.
  13. A CPU is a central processing unit that executes instructions from a computer program.
  14. A motherboard is what connects and allows all the parts of a computer to communicate with each other.
  15. RAM is the random-access memory that allows temporary data to be read and written at the same time.
  16. Storage, or the hard drive disk, is where all the long term data is stored for a computer.
  17. A sound card is used by a computer to input and output audio signals.
  18. A graphics card, also called a video card, is used by a computer to output video signals to an external device, like a computer monitor.
  19. A computer monitor is used to display video received from a computer.
  20. A computer keyboard is used to input numerical, alphabetical and special characters to a computer.
  21. A computer mouse is used to move a pointer on a computer monitor and has buttons that can be used to execute functions on the computer.
  22. There are many other devices, known as peripheral devices, that can be added to a computer, including but not limited to a printer, image scanner, web camera, microphone, headphone and speakers.

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