Up until that point, most of the pioneering computers had embodied at least part of the problem-solving process in their actual physical structure. The classic example was Bush's Differential Analyzer, in which the problem was represented by the arrangement of gears and shafts. The brilliant idea behind the stored-program concept was to make a clean split, to separate the problem-solving sequence from the hardware entirely. The act of computation thus became an abstract process that we now know as software, a series of commands encoded in a string of binary 1s and 0s and stored in the
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