You have been both overly specific and overly general in the same
paragraph ;)
I (simplistically) think of it this why.
Its is nothing more that a giant sophisticated calculator, that does
nothing but add and subtract ones and zeros.
It can answer such questions as: "yes or no", "0 or 1", "off or on".
You can look at a bit of information as being in one of two states, on
or off. By using a series of bits we can confer larger amounts of
information across a system bus (lanes in a highway), from data storage
devices such as memory, optical or magnetic media. We group bits in to
packages called "words" or bytes, but they are arbitrary. A computer
calculates values based on logic that is programmed via a set of
instructions based on the events we define, and interpreted by a set of
hard wired "logic" (yes or no) paths within the cpu.
I think the lego examples posted were designed to clarify the difference
between the principals of computing, (which is what you are trying to
understand it seems) vs the "mechanism" of computing, which is what you
were describing with the change in voltages (which is the physical
process of a semi-conductors and solid state electronics) which
represent the values of 1, 0; on, of; yes, no. You could just as easily
have logic devices based on water taps or rubber bands. The machine is
secondary to the principal.
Cheers
Scy.
William Case wrote:
Hi; For any who might be interested in the question I posed a few
minutes ago, I have made some adjustments to quoted paragraph. It now
reads:
"A digital computer is an appliance that takes in information meaningful
to humans; converts it into electrical data; stores it; may or may not
transform the data; and presents it as information to humans.
Electrical data consists of a set, or continuous stream, of lower or
higher voltage pulses or bits. Data is transformed by transistors
switching electrical data from one circuit to another. The possible
transformations are: changing a higher voltage bit to a lower voltage
and vice versa; arithmetic addition of two sets of data bits; and,
moving data from one meaningful location to another meaningful
location within the computer."
Regards Bill
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