The General Purpose Digital Computer

The General Purpose Digital Computer How can we define a ‘computer’? There are several kinds of devices that can be termed “computers”: from desktop machines to the micro controllers used in appliances such as a microwave oven, from the Abacus to the cluster of tiny chips used in parallel processors, etc. For the purpose of this course, we will use the following definition of a computer: “an electronic device, operating under the control of instructions stored in its own memory unit, that can accept data (input), process data arithmetically and logically, produce output from the processing, and store the results for future use.” Thus, when we use the term computer, we actually mean a digital computer. There are many digital computers, which have dedicated purposes, for example, a computer used in an automobile that controls the spark timing for the engine. This means that when we use the term computer, we actually mean a general-purpose digital computer that can perform a variety of arithmetic and logic tasks.