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Often programmers use virtual machines to simulate real computers. While we won't be building a real VM, in this project, we'll use Ruby classes to create our own imaginary computer that stores data!

Virtual Computer

Well done! Now let's spice up our `initialize` method by passing it some parameters and setting some instance variables.

Fancify Your Initialize Method

Let's go ahead and toss in a class variable. We'll use the variable `@@users` to keep track of all the users on our computer.

Have a Little Class

Now that you've learned all about classes and objects in Ruby, you can create any kind of Ruby object your heart desires. In this project, we'll use our newfound knowledge to create a class, `Machine`, and generate instances of that class that can manipulate imaginary files for us.

What You'll Be Building

Excellent! Our class is coming together, but it's a bit boring. Let's add another method, `create`. We'll want to do a few things in it:

Getting More Creative

Great work! You've got your very own `Computer` class that generates virtual computer instances.

Feel free to play around with your class. What if you add a method that updates files? Or deletes them? What if you want to add additional parameters to `initialize` or `create`?

You Did It!

All right! Let's go ahead and set up our class.

Create Your Class

Perfect! Now that we think of it, though, we could have a whole bunch of users creating files every which where, and we don't have a way of getting to our `@@users` class variable! We'll need to create a method to reach it.

Because `@@users` is a class variable, we'll use a class method to grab it. Most of the methods you've seen so far are instance methods—they work on a particular instance/object, such as "matz" or "blixy".  A class method belongs to the class itself, and for that reason, it's prefixed with the class name.

```rb
class Machine
  def Machine.hello
    puts "Hello from the machine!"
  end
end
```

There's a shortcut for this, which we'll learn in a later lesson.

Who are the Users?

Excellent! Last step: let's create an instance of our `Computer` class.

You've done this before, but here's a refresher.

```rb
class Person
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
end

emma = Person.new("emma")
```

1. In the example above, we first define a `Person` class with an `initialize` method.
2. Then, we create a new instance of `Person` and store it in a new variable called `emma`.