No other invention in the twentieth century has impacted virtually every aspect of our life like the digital computer. The hardware along with software have forever changed how we work with everything from the automobile to our checking accounts. It goes to the deepest parts of our oceans and planet to well beyond our solar system. In spite of how pervasive and sophisticated they are, they remain fairly simple and straight forward devices (although anyone who works with them regularly could easily argue with us on this point). An understanding of the material in this section should allow us to work with many hardware and software challenges.

Computers are organized into basic activities. This is referred to as the architecture of the computer as well as the software. The first part to look at is data processing. Data are merely the representation of something in the real world such as money by their binary equivalent. After we look at the rest of the architecture of the computer we will look at how these can be varied in the design process to produce different types of computer activities.

Next we look at how software can control the interactions of the hardware to...