Motherboards
The motherboard, or system board, contains the central processing unit (CPU), BIOS, other processing chips, memory, IO device connections, expansion slots, and more. Over the years, the motherboard has increasingly taken more functions from what was historically installed as expansion cards. For example, many computers you buy today have all of your typical input connectors (keyboard, mouse, USB), and added in Firewire (IEEE1394), video, network, audio (input and output), IDE, SCSI, SATA, and more.

The primary purpose of the motherboard is to process instructions from the operating system and applications. The processing is performed by the CPU which we will discuss in the next section. The motherboard stores active information in the memory and facilitates sending data to the hard drives through the drive interface.
