Friday, April 13, 2007

What is a computer?

Computer - is an electronic device capable of performing mathematical calculations and logical operations based on a set of instructions to produce a meaningful and / or useful information.

As you can notice above, to produce a meaningful and / or useful information simply means that not all outputs may be meaningful, but it may be useful to the programmer or the computer user.

But the above definition is not that applicable nowadays, as the use of computers is so broad that it goes beyond calculations. Now we can do image editing, documentations, even playing games and watching movies. But basically, the computer still does the mathematical operations, but it is not obvious to the user. Like in playing games, one may not notice, but the computer is continuously calculating millions of geometrical operations just to produce the stunning graphics that you see in your monitor.

The Computer, therefore, is a device that accepts input, process it using a set of instructions, to produce an output that the user needs.

No comments: