Computers form the underpinning of modern society, whether as "typical" machines, including PCs and Macs, or as larger mainframe systems, at the heart of large corporations. Almost all domestic "intelligent" devices include some form of computer, as an embedded device - including video recorders, microwave ovens and televisions.
The use of the word computer originally was given to people that performed long tedious sequences of mathematical calculations. Now the word is used to refer to an electronic device that processes data in digital format, using a complex set of operations executed by a Central Processing Unit (CPU), which is the heart of the modern day computer.
Modern computers are based on the von Neumann architecture. This is due to a 1946 paper that was written by John von Neumann along with Arthur W. Burks and Hermann H. Goldstine. The paper was titled "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument". It described the basic architecture and sub-systems that comprise the structure of a general purpose computing device. John von Neumann felt the four most basic sub-systems a general computing device required were an arithmetic processing unit, a memory storage unit, a master control unit and a way to interface with a human operator. All of these sub-sections and more are important in a modern computer.
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