 Hello dear learners, I am Dr. Sudeesh Rubabharali, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and today in this video I am going to talk about the topic Introduction to Computer. Now this topic is a part of the course Computer Fundamentals. Now learners, let us see what is a computer. The term computer is derived from the word compute which means to calculate. In the simplest form a computer can be defined as a programmable machine. It can be defined as an electronic machine capable of performing calculations and other manipulations of various types of data under the control of a stored set of instructions. Now the computer it accepts data from an input device and then processes it into some useful information which is then displayed on its output devices. A computer is a collection of hardware and software components that help you to accomplish many different tasks. Here the machine itself is the hardware and the instructions are the program or the software. Most of today's computer designs are based on the concepts developed by John von Neumann referred to as the von Neumann architecture. Now according to this architecture a computer must have two units. The first a processing unit and second a single separate storage unit. The term stored program computer is generally used to mean a computer of this design. We can see the architecture in the right-hand side in the figure here. So here we have the central processing unit or the CPU which is again divided into two parts, arithmetic and logic unit and the control unit. Now we also have the storage unit which is also known as the main memory here which is used to store instructions and data temporarily. The memory unit stores all the information in a group of memory cells or memory locations as binary digits. The arithmetic logic unit or ALU performs the arithmetic operations on data such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and also the logical operations such as finding whether a particular number is greater than another number if it is equal to other numbers and so on. The control unit directs the ALU to perform specific arithmetic and logical functions on the data. Let us look at the characteristics of computer. The first is speed. A powerful computer can perform billions of operations in just one second whereas as human beings may need a day or a week to perform the same operation. The second is accuracy. Now the level of accuracy depends on the instructions and the type of the machine used but overall computers are very accurate. The third is diligence. Now being a machine, computers do not suffer from tiredness and lack of concentration like as humans so it can perform millions of calculations with the same accuracy and speed. The fourth is reliability. Now, since computers do not require any human intervention between its processing operations therefore they are very reliable. The next characteristic is storage capacity. Computers can store large amounts of data and then can recall this required information almost instantaneously. Next is versatility. Computers can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. With the tremendous growth in computer technologies, resource sharing is also easily possible nowadays. The last characteristic is the lack of intelligence. We must know that a computer can only perform what it is programmed to do. It cannot take any decision on its own. This is one of the main limitations of a general computer. Thank you for listening to this video.