December 2006
Beginner
320 pages
11h 17m
English
Content preview from Inside the MachineBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The File-Clerk Model of Computing
The “calculator” model of computing, while useful in many respects, isn’t the only or even the best way to think about what computers do. As an alternative, consider the following definition of a computer:
A computer is a device that shuffles numbers around from place to place, reading, writing, erasing, and rewriting different numbers in different locations according to a set of inputs, a fixed set of rules for processing those inputs, and the prior history of all the inputs that the computer has seen since it was last reset, until a predefined set of criteria are met that cause the computer to halt.
We might, after Richard Feynman, call this idea of a computer as a reader, writer, and modifier of numbers the “file-clerk” ...
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