In my peripatetic journeys as a consultant, I’ve frequently come in contact with people who have little or no concept of what lies under the hood of a computer. It’s just not interesting to them the little bits of RAM and magnetic media whirling electrons about. I found myself explaining stuff over and over again and wondering how I could create an analogy that would describe a computer’s basic functions in a way that related to something almost everyone could understand and had some experience with.
My chosen reference: the desk, a calculator, filing folders, and a file cabinet which are analogous on a computer to the system memory (RAM), the processor (CPU), applications and files, and the hard drive respectively.
Here goes my story. In computerese, there are four basic elements which define a computer’s capacity in terms of speed and storage. We’re not going to go into networking in general here, but sticking with the basic parts that most users run into that they could use a better understanding of.
So, let’s get into our analogy. Imagine you are sitting at a desk. It’s perhaps four feet by 3 feet wide, so 12 square feet of workspace is available for you to work upon. In one corner is a calculator, one of those old-fashioned kinds with the handle on it so you can make this great crunching noise when doing your figures. If that picture doesn’t suit, then put a handheld calculator there instead.
Your ability to do work is limited by the size of your workspace and the speed of your calculator. Since any task you want to work on means taking up desktop space, you can only open as many projects on your desk as you have room for. Don’t forget the calculator takes up space, and you need to leave a litttle bit of free room to move stuff about.
So, if each project takes up one square foot, and your calculator takes up one square, and you need one square foot free to move stuff back and forth, how many square feet do you have to work with? Well, about 10 square feet, or ten projects.
Trying to open any more than that leads to confusion and chaos as projects end up bumping into each other, or lying on the calculator or creating all sorts of organizational problems and overhead.
The space on your desk is analogous to RAM, or Read-Only-Memory, or simply memory. Your computer needs a workspace to do calculations, to open files, and to run the operating system, plus some free space just for fun. Actually the free space is crucial. Without it your computer begins to swap stuff off and on the hard drive which is slow and generally bollixes things up. It’s not optimal.
Having plenty of computer memory, or RAM, just like having enough workspace on your desktop at home is a good thing. 1 GB is kind of the lower limit these days, while adding 2GB or more is pretty cheap to do.
So, your desktop is plenty big and you’ve got your files and folders spread all over and are ready to work. What’s next? Well the speed of your calculator will also affect your ability to do work. The faster the better. Computers are basically tremendously fast, multi-processing calculators. Their speed is calculated in megahertz or more commonly now in gigahertz. Computer calculators are also called central processing units (CPU) or just processor.
So, you’ve got a blazing fast calculator, lots of desktop room, and you are all set to go, right? Wrong! Where do you keep all the projects when you are not working on them actively. It’s all very well that you’ve got a nice large desk, but you can’t very well keep all the projects you want to work on open on your desk, or even stacked there. It would be impossible. You’ve got literally hundreds or thousands of file folders containing files.
The desktop is an active workspace, meaning you only open stuff when you want to work on it. Maybe it lies in a corner for a bit while you are doing other things, but the intent is to have it available, ready to be worked on when it’s on the desktop.
What’s the inner organizer going to do? Get a file cabinet of course. The file cabinet is big, cheap and slow, perfect for storing those project folders in mass quantity.
When you want to get a project from the file cabinet, it’s slow because you have to walk over, open it up, get the project and bring it back to your desk. Takes a bit of time but it’s worth it as your file cabinet can hold the mother lode of projects instead of trying to stack it all on your desk, god forbid.
The file cabinet, in case you haven’t guessed by now, is your computer’s hard drive, a large storage device. When you open an application or access a file or folder, your computer reads the data off the drive and loads it into memory (puts it on your desktop ready to do work).
This analogy, while a bit simplistic, helps give you a working idea of what your computer is doing, and delineates the four working components of your computer that most affects your ability to do work: the memory (desktop workspace), the calculator (central processing unit), projects (files, folder and data), and the file cabinet (hard drive).
So, next time your friend says “gee, I think I’m running out of memory”, you say, “that’s your hard drive you’re looking at, and it’s got 350GB of free space…I think you’re doing just fine.”
