◄Previous: 4 Summary of Session 8

# 5 Course summary

Congratulations on completing the course. You should now be able to:

- visualise the room-filling early computers and appreciate how the technology has changed to achieve the computers of today
- consider how many computers there are in the world today, how they pervade our lives, and how computer systems come in many different forms
- understand how computers can be networked together to provide additional functionality
- identify the components of a computer, from its processor to its input and output devices
- understand how the world we live in with text, numbers, images and sound can be represented as data for a computer to process
- begin to see how instructions can be written for a computer to process data
- consider the energy implications of the increasing use of computers.

◄Contents►Next: Next steps

OpenLearn - An introduction to computers and computer systems
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.