For instance, I have a programmable watering system for outside. It has knobs for frequency and duration. Is it really computing anything, or is it full of non-computing electronics?
In: Engineering
They key feature of a computer is that it is *programmable*. You could come along with a CD, USB stick or internet connection and load entirely new software onto it, allowing it to do something new.
In contrast *embedded devices* or *electronics* basically just do one function. Maybe you could upgrade the software of your watering system, but it isn’t going to be able to show you a film, or run excel.
The physical hardware of an embedded device is optimised for that one job; your watering system will have just enough computing power to run a simple watering program, and it has the correct inputs and outputs (knobs, a small display) to do that task. In contrast a computer has much more general hardware which lets you do lots of different things (a big screen, mouse, plenty of RAM)
Some things sit right at the boundary, for example a programmable calculator can run lots of different programs (I have cartridges for astro-navigation, games etc), but it also has dedicated buttons for mathematical operations.
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