Before we get into more specific technical material we need to start with describing some basic principles. To some of the target audience you may be thinking you know all this but I encourage you to bear with me as we touch on each topic in turn and lay the foundations for the basis of the rest of this article.
This may sound like a silly question but with the way technology has evolved different people may allocate different definitions.
In the context of this article, we consider a computer essentially anything that consists of the following elements:
At least one form of input mechanism
At least one form of output mechanism
Some form of internal state
A means of processing the inputs and using said inputs to affect the outputs and/or the internal state in some way
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A Turing Machine is the basic theoretical model upon which all modern computers are essentially based. It incorporates the concepts of a state machine and a memory store, and while technology has advanced significantly since the concept of a computer was first envisaged the basic theoretical model still applies.
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