[Once customers choose something, purchases are made by cash or check only. Credit cards and computers aren't used. Receipts are hand-written. And the inventory is jotted on 3-by-5 cards in 3-foot-long boxes.] It's cheaper, and we keep prices down by doing that, ... It's easy. It's the way we've always done it.

We're really happy about what's happening.

It's like a beacon in town, ... A lot of people leave Terre Haute and then come back, and they come here and we've never changed. It's like coming home.

It's just a job you look forward to going to. It's not a drudgery job. You see your friends.

So I hopped in my car and headed down to Fifth Street,

We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.