The CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) chip. This memory contains your BIOS (Basic Input Output System)
Your BIOS tells the computer where to look for a boot disk. The computer then goes to find it and looks for a Master Boot Record on the disk (cd, floppy, hard, etc). The MBR then give additional instructions on files to load from locations on the disk. Those files link to other files and so on.
The BIOS.
The BIOS.
The instructions are stored in the Master Boot Record (MBR).
memory
It is important because the human does not have to execute instruction from without the machine. Instructions can be stored in memory and executed in sequence referencing the data values it needs on which to operate.
Tune the radio to the station you want to set into the preset. Push and hold the preset button for more than 2 seconds where you want the station stored. The display will flash to indicate it has stored the frequency.
'Stored program' was the breakthrough that enabled computers to perform complex tasks in fractions of a second. Being able to do arithmetic and evaluate formulas fast would be useless if a person had to keep telling the computer what to do next. The trick was encoding the list of instructions into numbers that could coexist in the computer's memory along with data, and having a 'processor' built into the machine to decode and execute the instructions. Now the computer could do both, calculate and control the sequence of calculations, at electronic speed. Many credit John von Neumann with devising the stored program concept, but probably several others were also involved.
'Stored program' was the breakthrough that enabled computers to perform complex tasks in fractions of a second. Being able to do arithmetic and evaluate formulas fast would be useless if a person had to keep telling the computer what to do next. The trick was encoding the list of instructions into numbers that could coexist in the computer's memory along with data, and having a 'processor' built into the machine to decode and execute the instructions. Now the computer could do both, calculate and control the sequence of calculations, at electronic speed. Many credit John von Neumann with devising the stored program concept, but probably several others were also involved.
A field
Intel is the trade name of one brand of processor. Like most processors, their fundamental job is to execute a sequence of instructions that make up a computer program. Typical functions of a processor is to perform arithmetic and logical operation, extract instructions stored in memory, decodes then executes those instructions, then outputing the results. A simple analogy is to say, the processor is the "brains" of the computer. Without it, the system will fail to operate as a whole.
Microcode is a layer of low-level instructions stored in a computer's firmware that controls the operations of the processor. Its purpose is to translate complex instructions from higher-level programming languages into simpler operations that the processor can understand and execute efficiently. This helps improve the performance and flexibility of the processor while allowing for updates to be made without needing to modify the actual hardware.
Von Neumann was the first person to suggest to concept of the stored program. This concept states that there is no difference between computer instructions and data. More importantly, he suggested that it was not necessary to have separate storage location for a computer program and data -- hence today, computer instructions are stored in primary memory for execution, along with other data.