Digital Computers

A Digital computer can be considered as a digital system that performs various computational tasks.

The first electronic digital computer was developed in the late 1940s and was used primarily for numerical computations.

By convention, the digital computers use the binary number system, which has two digits: 0 and 1. A binary digit is called a bit.

A computer system is subdivided into two functional entities: Hardware and Software.

The hardware consists of all the electronic components and electromechanical devices that comprise the physical entity of the device.

The software of the computer consists of the instructions and data that the computer manipulates to perform various data-processing tasks.

• The Central Processing Unit (CPU) contains an arithmetic and logic unit for manipulating data, a number of registers for storing data, and a control circuit for fetching and executing instructions.
• The memory unit of a digital computer contains storage for instructions and data.
• The Random Access Memory (RAM) for real-time processing of the data.
• The Input-Output devices for generating inputs from the user and displaying the final results to the user.
• The Input-Output devices connected to the computer include the keyboard, mouse, terminals, magnetic disk drives, and other communication devices.