There are two ways to think about computers as helpful machines. One is that they are dumb but fast, the other is that they are smart and can learn and do things we can't imagine. Like most things, both are true.
Computers manipulate, store and compute numbers.
Although they appear to do lots more than this such as playing video games and running the world wide web, the language of the computer is based on numbers. This counting system used by digital computers is binary , a string of ones and zeros, and quite different from the way most people tabulate things and make change. The amazing part of the computer for most people is that any kind of information that can be represented numerically can be stored, processed, sent, or received by a computer in all sorts of forms such as music, art, spread sheets of numbers, movies or text. It takes specialized knowledge to represent a photograph numerically, and most users rely on already written programs which do the translation from picture to numbers and back again. A word processor, for example, uses different numbers to represent each letter of the alphabet, as well as combinations of numbers to instruct the computer about type face, spacing, indenting, pagination, and the like.