What is a Computer?
Computers are changing all our lives and also old ways of doing things with their superhuman speed. They come in different sizes – from very large to small pocket sized ones. They can almost be used in any field of activity. No one can deny their influence and importance.
Computers are used to design different things. They are used in giant airplanes and modern cars. All spacecrafts which are orbiting out through space are controlled by computers.
In addition to helping us to work better, computers are opening new fields of endeavour. Perhaps the most important is in medicine where computers are helping doctors to research disease, chemists to design drugs and disabled people to learn skills. But how is the computer able to perform so many different tasks?
A computer does all these tasks by means of processing the information. It can do all this because it is programmable. This means that it can be given instructions, called programs, which tell it exactly what to do. By feeding in different programs, computers can be switched from one job to another.
Furthermore, computers can also be programmed to do many separate tasks at the same time. The central computer of an airline, for example, is constantly busy sending and receiving information to and from offices and airports around the world.