From the brains behind brains on, this is The Moment of Um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Ruby Guthrie.

I spend a lot of time on my computer. Sometimes I wish I spent less time on it. That said, computers are

pretty amazing. It helps me do so many different things. I can type up scripts on my computer,

or look up the best cherry strudel recipes in seconds. I can watch the most hilarious cat

videos. And I can talk to most hilarious cat videos.

And I can talk to my grandparents who live on the other side of the world.

It's incredible.

But what exactly makes a computer a computer?

Like, is my phone a computer?

Landon was wondering about this, too.

A computer is made up of four components. My name is Sam Dickerson. I'm an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. And I am also the director

for the computer engineering program here at Pitt.

Every computer has to have some sort of input.

So if you think of like your laptop, you have a keyboard, you have a mouse.

There has to be output to a computer.

So you have a monitor, maybe you have sound. There has to be memory in a computer. So something to store information. So you think of all the files on your computer,

other programs. It could be games. It could be images, music, your homework. And then most

importantly, a computer has to have a processor. The processor

is kind of the brains of the computer. This is what's scheduling tasks and executing commands

and is making everything happen behind the scene. We can also think of something that we might not necessarily think of being a computer as being a computer.

Like, for example, your mobile phone.

...