The Use of Computers

The digital computer is just a tool. Like a hammer, it comes in various sizes and styles, and it has many uses. As with a hammer, the benefits of using it depend on the skill of the user.

Nowadays the computer is increasingly being used as a component of other machinery, just as hammers are built into pianos, carillons, and hammer mills.

Apart from considerations of manufacture and marketing, machinery with built-in computation, such as a modern sewing machine, is expected to be more capable and easier to use. Usually they are more capable, but all too often they are much harder to use, except when the machine is being used for repetitive work.

A computer, when being used as a computer, is not at all like a hammer in that a hammer is used to manipulate physical objects while a computer is used to manipulate data. Another way the computer is different is that its manipulations are done at two or three levels.

At the hardware level, components such as transistors and capacitors are connected to deal with the individual binary digits of the data.

At the firmware level, functional data called the microprogram is used to control the circuitry of the hardware and to facilitate the software level.

At the software level, operational data called programs are used to cause the computer to manipulate the user’s data in the required way.

That is the nature of computation nowadays, or at least a very simple view of it. Computers have evolved through changes in this structure.

Now the typical computer is an extremely complex structure of hardware, firmware and software, each of which is itself an extremely complex structure. Only specialists deal with the hardware and firmware because programmers and other users of computers are shielded from the complexity of the hardware and firmware by the software.

There are two kinds of software: system programs and application programs.

System programs are of two kinds. The programs of the operating system hide the complexity of the computer from both programmers, particularly those who write the application programs for ordinary users.

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