This or one of many other equivalent 'introduction to computer' books will be useful to introduce the general reader to the concept of computation and the techniques used in commercial computers, often assumed background knowledge in other references discussing alternative computational architectures such as neural networks. This book is the revised edition of the 1976 classic that introduced the world of computation, albeit in the form of microcomputers, to thousands of readers. The binary arithmetic, CPU and memory architecture, logical operations, instruction sets and programming, are concepts that are still relevant to modern computing. At the time of this reference, Adam Osborne was a well known personal computer-related writer. In 1971 he was involved in the documentation for the Intel 4004 microprocessor, and at the time of this book was running a company manufacturing one of the first widely purchased portable microcomputer systems.