Look at the picture above. Believe it or not, that person is operating an extremely sophisticated mechanical calculator, capable of generating tables that evaluate functions called “polynomials.” Although a graphing calculator can do that, a pocket calculator certainly can’t. The device above is a mechanical purpose-built computer! This article is the next installment of my series on computing. In the previous parts, we learned about Boolean logic, the language computers think in. We then learned how to implement this logic electronically and, using our newfound understanding of electronics, how to make computer memory so that computers can record results