Characteristics, Capabilities And Limitations Of Computers
COMPUTER SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS AND CAPABILITIES
1. Automatic
An automatic machine works by itself without human intervention. Computers are automatic machines because once started on a job, they carry out the job (normally without any human assistance) until it is finished. However, computers being machines cannot start themselves and cannot go out and find their own problems and solutions. We need to instruct a computer using coded instructions that specify exactly how it will do a particular job.
2. Speed
The smallest unit of time in the human experience is, realistically, the second. The operations (the execution of an instruction) for personal computer are measured in thousands of a second, or milliseconds. Operations for larger processors are measured in microseconds, nanoseconds, and picoseconds. Current computer systems can amass, manipulate, and provide data in fractions of a second, Computers can perform in minutes tasks that would take a person years to complete.
Today computers can perform 100 million computations in one second.
The speed of a computer is closely related to the amount of data it must process. The terms volume and frequency are often used to describe the amount of data handled by a computer system. Volume may represent the overall quantity of data to be processed. Frequency describes how often a specific data item is used in processing.
3. Accuracy
The computer must process data accurately as well as quickly. Accuracy is a prime consideration in installing computers. Any calculating device is useless if its results are unreliable. Computers are universally accused of making mistakes on bills, cheques, and statements, although most errors attributed to computers are really human errors. The probability of computer error is quite small and often traceable to faulty data. Computers rarely make mistakes and can accurately perform all kinds of complex...
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