Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Chapter 4. Digital Electronics

First and foremost, the computer is a thinking machine—and that implies all sorts of preposterous nonsense. The thinking machine could be a devious device, hatching plots against you as it sits on your desk. A thinking machine must work the same unfathomable way as the human mind, something so complicated that in thousands of years of attempts by the best geniuses, no one has yet satisfactorily explained how it works. A thinking machine has a brain, so you might suppose that opening it up and working inside it is brain surgery, and the electronic patient is likely to suffer irreversible damage at the hands of an unskilled operator.

But computers don't think—at least not in the same way you and I do or Albert Einstein ...