Book excerpt: Bits, bytes, logic, RAM, CPUs, hard drives and SSD drives. Master the geeky acronyms and simplify computer hardware & terminology with ease. This book is great for beginners or a basic computing class. Exploring Computer Hardware looks at: The microcomputer, mainframes and super computers Hardware components CPU architecture, instructions sets, and the fetch execute cycle Computer ports and plugs Network topologies, LANs, WANs, MANs, fibre optics and ethernet WiFi and Cellular networks The internet: email, the cloud, the world-wide web IP Addressing, web servers, DNS servers and DHCP servers TCP/IP model, OSI model, ports, sockets Logic gates, binary arithmetic, two's complement, floating point, hexadecimal, and base conversions Data Storage: bits, bytes, kilo bytes, kibi bytes, megabytes... Data compression, encryption, sort, and search algorithms, and more Techniques are illustrated step-by-step using photography, illustrations, video demos, and screen prints throughout, together with concise, easy to follow text from an established expert in the field, provide a comprehensive guide to computer hardware. We want to create the best possible resource to help you, so if we've missed anything out then please get in touch using [email protected] and let us know. Thanks.