Master Slave

Is a model for communication protocal in which a device or process (master) controls one or more other devices or processes (slave). When the master/slave relationship is established the direction of control is always from the master to slave.

System unit and components:

Processors and options;

Motherboard- The motherboard is the underlying board in a computer. There are many interfaces plugged into the motherboard such as CPU (central processing unit), RAM (random access memory), hard drives, optical drives and disk drives. There are optional interfaces that can be built in the motherboard such as a video interface or a sound card. Most motherboards come with two IDE interfaces (primary and secondary)

BIOS- (basic input output system) the BIOS makes sure all the other chips, ports and hard drives, CPUs function together. Bios is the most common uses of flash memory. BIOS is the third type of software a computer needs to run successfully. its most important role is loading the operating system. Other tasks the bios carries out are, a power on self-test (post) activating other BIOS chips as many other components such as graphic cards often have there own. It also manages many things like the keyboard and the screen etc

Power supply- For a computer system to work you need a power supply. The power supply converts alternating current(AC) into direct current (DC)

Fan and heat sink- A Fan and heat sink is a part in the computer which controls its temperature by disperses heat into the surrounding air. All modern CPUs require a heat sink not all central processing units need a fan with the heat sink. A heat sink without a fan is called a passive heat sink.

Hard drive configuration controllers;
IDE- integrated drive electronics, is a hard drive interface for personal computers. Its used between a motherboard data paths and the computers disk drive storage devices.
EIDE- Enhanced integrated drive electronics, is a standard electronic interface between the pc and its mass storage drives and provides faster access to the hard drive. It suports many other parts such as Direct memory access and support for many additional drives including CD-Rom.
Master-
Slave-

Ports; a communication channel for computers and networks
USB: A USB port is a standard cable connection interface.USB ports allow stand-alone electronic devices to be connected via cables to a computer. a personal computer is provided with one or more serial ports and usually one paralel port. The serial port supports one bit-at-a-time transmission to devices such as scanners and the parallel port supports multiple-bit-at-a-time transmission to devices such as printers.

Plotter is similar to a printer in ways as instead of drawing dots to form a picture it uses lines.

Internal memory- refers to both ram and maybe rom and flash memory. Internal memory usually refers to chips rather than disks and/or tapes.
Ram (random access memory) is all internal workspace of the computer which is lost when the computer is turned off.

Specialized cards-
Network cards- a network card is something that lets your pc connect to a local network. Network cards can be USBs or cards that use a slot in the PCI bus. Many motherboards now days have network interfaces
Graphic cards- the computer has to order each pixel to form a picture and to do this is needs to be translated from binary data from the cpu and into a image. The translation takes place on a graphics card.

What is an operating system?
What is the purpose? What are the features and functions?

An operating system is software components which is responsible for the management and co-ordination of actions and the sharing of properties of the computer. A main purpose of a operating system is too manage the hardware. All Computers need an operating system, The most common operating system is produced by Microsoft which is the windows family. Microsoft’s first operating system was created in November 1985 (Windows 1.01). In any gadget that has an operating system, there is a way to make changes to how the device works. They can be changed or customized without having to affect the other devices or procedures. This is because it is made out of a portable code rather than permanent physical circuits. Operating systems offer a number of services to application programs and users. Applications access these services through application programmes interfaces (APIs) or sysyem calls

There are two main functions of what an operating system does one being that is manages both all the hardware resources and the software resources such as the processor, memory, disk space, programmes etc.
The second main reason is that it provides a stable way to deal with all the hardware without the need too know every small little detail about the hardware.

Two types of different operating systems are-
Microsoft’s windows and apples Mac OS (operating system) are both examples of single user but multi tasking operating systems. This lets one user use several different programmes at one time. For example if the user wanted to write a document and research it using the internet at the same time as writing the document in word, the user could do this at one time. Where as the Palm Os for a handheld palm is a modern single user, single task operating system. This Allows the user to use only one programme/operation at one time, this user would not be able to use the internet and write a document at once.