What is a
Computer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia?
Start with that page to get the basics..
A computer at it's core is made up on a CPU (Central Processing Unit). These CPUs come in a few varieties, a lot more in the past, but the dominent ones now are X86 (Intel/AMD), ARM(a whole bunch of manufacturers) and PowerPC (IBM).
These CPUs have an instruction set that is unique to them and they are the most BASIC possible thing. "move a value from here to there", "add one value to another", "subtract one value from another", "compare this value with that value" and so on..
Assembly language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is used to write these instructions..this is also called "machine language" since it's the lowest possible level of code that can be executed on the processors.
Apart from VERY small machines and very early boot code, not much else is written in Assembly. Most things are written in higher level languages like C, C++, Objective-C and so on..
Now this is the "software" side of things..
On the "hardware" side of things, apart from the CPU you have a bunch of other helpers hardware that manage unique functionality, things like the south/north bridge, memory bus handlers, and so on..
They all interface back to the CPU and provide access to devices on these unique buses.
This is no where a complete picture of how a computer works, but hopefully it gets you started in the right direction..