Computers do their work one step at the time. Over, and over, and over, and over again. The breakthrough came when not only the data they manipulate but also the instructions that drive their actions were stored in memory. You take data from memory, you “process” them in some way, and at times you also put something back. Most of it used to be about doing arithmetic - nowadays it’s more about pushing bits around in interesting ways than true “computation”.
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