Oh great. Do you have a few years?
Lets bring this down to its most basic level. Computers run on binary, 1s and 0s. Boolean Logic gates prosses them. Theses gates have only to settings 1 or 0, ture or false, on or off. There are several kinds on gates. The first two digits (on the left) are the imports the last one (farest to the right is the output, with the exception of the NOT gate wihch only has 1 inport.
The basic gates:
NOT:
01
10
AND:
000
100
010
111
OR:
000
101
011
111
Those are the 3 basic gates. There are many more that are combination of those 3.
The Not gates:
NOR:
001
100
010
110
NAND
001
101
011
110
The X gates:
XOR:
000
101
011
110
XNOR:
001
100
010
111
Using these gates we can make (sorry my pet bird is on my shoulder bugging me) more complex things such as the multiplexer, demultiplexer, RAM, Flip flops, and do math.
http://www.play-hookey.com/
Now we are going to stift gears. Play-hookey will explain how all the stuff I just measion works cause I don't have the time or pasences (sp) to.
I hope you know what RAM, ROM, and Harddrives are. RAM is the memory your computer uses when its runing. Your hard Drive is where perminite memory is stored. Why do we have to have RAM then. Your computer would run 10 times slowing if it did because RAM is very quick to access. Harddrives take longer. ROM is where periment instuctions are held. Go the Howstuffworks and read these articals
Bites & Bytes
Boolean Logic
Electronic Gates
Hard Drives
RAM
ROM
General Memory
Microprossors
PC
Thats the hardware.