Exercise 1.1

Describe three types of hardware and their uses.

1) Floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible ("floppy") magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive or FDD, the latter initialize not to be confused with "fixed disk drive", which is an old IBM term for a hard disk drive.

2) A computer printer, or more commonly just printer, is a device that produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as computer peripherals, and are permanently attached by a printer cable to a computer which serves as a document source.

3)A computer keyboard is a peripheral partially modeled after the typewriter keyboard. Keyboards are designed for the input of text and characters and also to control the operation of a computer. Physically, computer keyboards are an arrangement of rectangular or near-rectangular buttons, or "keys". Keyboards typically have characters engraved or printed on the keys; in most cases, each press of a key corresponds to a single written symbol. However, to produce some symbols requires pressing and holding several keys simultaneously or in sequence; other keys do not produce any symbol, but instead affect the operation of the computer or the keyboard itself. Roughly 50% of all keyboard keys produce letters, numbers or signs (characters). Other keys can produce actions when pressed, and other actions are available by the simultaneous pressing of more than one action key.