The Monitor

The monitor is a name for that television screen thingy we look at, it's also known as a Visual Display Unit (VDU), a screen.

Monitors come in two types, the traditional large box type and the flat screen monitor type, both are shown below:

Traditional style monitor	Slim line type monitor

Both types do thier job well but the more traditional type of monitor is now going out of fashion and is getting more and more difficult to find. They both connect to the rear of the computer into either the motherboard or a graphics card in the same way via a 15 pin D-Type connector, (see the technical page accessed by clicking on the Information button at the top of this page for a more in depth description).

The monitor allows us to see what is going on in the computers memory in a manner that we can understand, the computer can only understand binary, (a series of 1's and 0's) and we as people find it difficult if not impossible to understand what a series of 1's and 0's could be, as an example, let's take the phrase ' this is binary '.

In binary, this would equate to:

011101000110100001101001011100110010000001101001011100110010000001100010011010010110111001100001011100100 1111001

Now, that doesn't exactly mean anything to me, (although it may do to you <LOL>) so, I would prefer to see the words , ' this is binary ' written on the screen.

The only real choice here is what colour do you want your monitor to be and how big do you want your screen, the minimum would be 17" - 19"