Hardware

Hardware is everything physically present in a computer: the keyboard, mouse, the screen, and the case where the actual computer resides all constitute hardware.

Internally, there's even more hardware that makes up a basic computer. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) resides on a circuit board called the mother board and can be loosely described as the "brains" of the computer. Other chips work with the CPU; for example, to keep track of things, the computer has memory chips called RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory.

Other internal hardware include the hard drive (where you store information such as letters you type), the video card (which connects your computer to the screen so you can view things), the MODEM (which lets you connect your computer to the Internet), and the sound card (which lets you hear things such as music or special sounds your computer makes when something happens).

All this hardware works together to make up what we generally call a computer. As was true of software, every computer has different internal and external hardware.