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Hi, my name is Madison Maxey.

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I have a company called Loomia,

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and we focus on making smart fabrics for smart clothing and smart soft good products.

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The sky's the limit when it comes to textiles.

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My name is Danielle Applestone, and I'm CEO of Othermachine Company.

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We build a desktop milling machine.

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A milling machine takes a rotating cutting tool and moves it through material to create a 3D object.

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Under the hood, all computers do the same four basic things.

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They input information,

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store and process the information,

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and then, output information.

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Each of these things is done by a different part of the computer.

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There are input devices that take input from the outside world and convert it into binary information.

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There is memory to store this information.

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There's a central processing unit or CPU,

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where all the calculations are done.

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And, finally, there are output devices that take information and convert it into a physical output.

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Let's talk about input first.

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Computers can take many different types of input, like the keyboard of a computer, the touchpad of a phone,

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a camera, a microphone, or a GPS.

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But even the sensors on a car, a thermostat, or a drone are also different input devices.

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Now, let's look at a simple example of how input travels through a computer and becomes output.

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When you press a key on your keyboard - let's say the letter "B". The keyboard converts the letter to a number.

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That number is sent as binary, ones and zeros, into the computer.

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Starting from this number, the CPU calculates how to display the letter "B" pixel by pixel.

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The CPU requests step-by-step instructions from memory, which tell it how to draw the letter "B".

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The CPU runs these instructions and stores the results as pixels in memory.

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Finally, this pixel information is sent in binary to the screen.

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The screen is an output device, which converts the binary signals into the tiny lights and colors that make up what you see.

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This all happens so quickly it feels instantaneous,

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but to display each letter a computer runs thousands of instructions,

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starting from the moment your finger presses the key point.

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In that example, the output device was the screen, but there are many different types of output

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which take a binary signal from the computer and do something in the physical world.

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For example, a speaker will play sound, and a 3D printer will print an object.

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Output devices can also control physical motion like a robotic arm, the motor of a car,

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or the cutting tool of the milling machine that my company makes.

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New types of inputs and outputs let computers interact with the world in entirely new ways.

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This has been helped out by improvements to the speed and size of the memory and CPU.

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The more complicated a task is and the more information that is input or output,

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the more processing power and memory a computer needs.

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Typing letters on a screen may be easy but to do complicated 3d graphics or record a high-definition movie,

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modern computers often have multiple CPUs to process all that information

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and many gigabytes of memory to store it.

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No matter what it is you want to do with the computer, every single action is about:

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inputting information from the physical world,

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storing and processing that information,

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and getting some output back into the physical world.