The Kitchen Analogy
I heard a basic form of this from somebody back when I was doing pc tech work. It’s a way to explain what each component in a computer does in a way that your grandmother will understand.
Your kitchen is the computer, you are the processor, your counter is ram, and your cupboards are the hard drive. Running a program is much the same as cooking a meal. To start with you go to the cupboard, grab some bowls and place these on the counter. This is much like loading a program into ram. The more you plan to cook the more ram you need so you don’t have keep moving things back and forth from the cupboard to the counter. A faster CPU can help but most of it’s time will be wasted moving things from the cupboard to the counter if your counter isn’t big enough. The more cooking tools you want to store the more cupboard space you need. Thus everything needs to grow in relation to everything else.
More things can be added in such as using a cutting board to explain cpu cache.
March 10th, 2005 at 9:16 pm
I’ve actually never heard that analogy, but it’s awesome! I think I can finally explain why my mom needs to dump a few bucks on me to buy me a new HDD.
I used to do the “desk” analogy, but that often failed with people who’ve never seen a real business desk. :/ This one is perfect though.
Funny how sexist it is, but it works: mom understands kitchen, dad understands desk… @_@
March 10th, 2005 at 9:23 pm
I don’t think it’s sexist at all. I (when I had cable) spent more time watching food network than any other channel.