Isn't the history of computers super interesting? I love going back in time and seeing how we got to this exciting point in computing. You've already taken the first few steps to building your foundational knowledge of IT, and before we dive deeper, I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Devan Sri-Tharan, I've been working in IT for ten years. I'm a Corporate Operations Engineer at Google where I get to tackle challenging and complex IT issues. Thinking back, my first experience with tech began when I was about nine years old, when my dad brought home the family's first computer. I remember my dad holding a floppy disk and telling me that there was a game on it. To my dad's amazement I somehow managed to copy the game from disk onto the computer's hard drive. While it might seem like a trivial task now, this devise was just so new to us back then. Sure, I loved the different games I could play, but what I really loved was tinkering with the machine, trying to get it to do what I want it to do. While that floppy disk computer might have ignited my passion for technology, it was actually my first few job experiences that really started to shape my IT career. One was in retail, [LAUGH] selling baby furniture and the other was at a postal store, where I helped customers ship their packages, and became the one person IT crew. It might sound odd that working in retail inspired my career, but I've realized I really enjoy communicating with customers, trying to understand their needs and offering a solution. My first experience working directly in IT was in college as an IT support specialist intern. From there, I worked as an IT consultant to decommission an entire IT environment. This was my first experience working directly with large IT infrastructure, and pushing myself outside my comfort level as a college student. I bring up these few jobs for a reason. These experiences helped shape my career in IT. I knew at that time that I wanted to go into tech, but I struggled where I wanted to focus my career. Starting at Google as an IT generalist allowed me to experience many different areas of technology. It allowed me to figure out the jobs I didn't want to do, before I was able to identify exactly what I did want to do. Really passionate about IT infrastructure, but you can't understand infrastructure until you understand hardware. So let's dig in. In IT, hardware is an essential topic to understand. You might find yourself replacing faulty components or even upgrading an entire fleet of machines one day. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to describe all the physical parts of a computer and how they work together. You'll even be able to build your own computer. Once you figure out how one computer works, you'll be able to understand how any type of computer works. Excited? I am, let's get started.