Universality
Universality means in broad terms “anything one computer can do, any computer can do”
Universality says computers are all equivalent
- A new computer doesn’t do more than the computer it replaces, it just does it faster
- Though there have been many generations of computers, none have been “more powerful” than the very first computers, in the sense of being able to solve more problems or compute more things
- Universality is true because the instruction set of one computer -- the computer’s basic operations implemented in hardware -- can be simulated by the instruction set of any other computer, enabling it to do whatever the original machine could do