What makes a computer programmable and not a single purpose machine?
In: Technology
For that you need to understand how a computer works. It uses binary, which you probably already know only consist of 1’s and 0’s. 1 means on (like sending an electric signal), 0 means off (not doing anything). This is really clever, because an electric signal can either be on or off, there are no other options, but from those two we have made a “language” which allows us much more than just these two. You can have several of them in a row and thus get additional meanings. We do this by having a sequence of 1’s and 0’s, for example 1001 might mean something else than 0101. Kind of like how morse code only consist of short and long, but you can make small sequences to make out the whole alphabet. Now, you probably know how computers are either 32 bit oe 64 bit (often stated when you buy windows, currently 64 bit is normal). This is essentially how f a sequence can be, so 1001 would be 4 bit, but 64 bit has 64 spots. This allows for a lot of different meanings!
Now, from a hardware perspective your PC is made of a motherboard, a GPU (graphics card), a CPU (processor), RAM, storage and some cooling to make sure things down melt down. The GPU and CPU are close to the same actually, they both have “cores” and each core have a frequency they can work at. A core is essentially like a little worker, he can do something. The frequency is how strong the worker is. Now, a CPU usually have a few workers, like 8. Each of those 8 are, however, very strong workers. The GPU on the other hand can have several thousand workers, but each of them are very weak. The RAM is actually just like your storage, except much faster, but in turn has way less space and it deletes everything regularly. This is like a guy remembering stuff for the workers. When a worker does something he might ask RAM to remember it for a little bit later. The motherboard connects all these things.
That is a simple version of it, of course there are a few more things. How does this connect? Well all those workers get told what to do in binary. When you run a software it essentially reads out loud instructions for when an electronic should send electricity or not (1 or 0).
Now, how much can it do? Well, the limit is how many bits it is. For 64 bit you can do 2^63-1 different things (the -1 is because one of the spots that can be 0 or 1 is left to tell if the number is positive or negative). That number written out is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. So you can just assign each of these things a purpose, which is what programmers does. They make “manuals” for the computer. Of course we don’t do it in binary, because that would be hard. Instead we just made a language with a translation. Just like with morse how you know dot line means A, when you write something in a programming language it means something in binary.
The computer’s instructions are, from the point of view of the computer, just another kind of data. So you can load programs, you can use tools to make new programs and store them, you can (usually with malicious intent) modify them on the fly.
It’s whole structure.
The CPU is just a blank calculation machine. It gets data and commands from the memory and writes data back into the memory, so what it does depends fully on what is saved in there.
An analogy would be a toolbox, you have different tools, for different tasks, but the order and how you use them can be freely chosen.
I hope this answers what you were asking because I don’t fully understand your question
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