> My mind was absolutely blown when I first realized that the function of a CPU is pretty much to read tokens from a stream and perform an action for each. My

> My mind was absolutely blown when I first realized that the function of a CPU is pretty much to read tokens from a stream and perform an action for each. My "aha!" moment when I first learned about CPUs was the program counter, or if you're an Intel guy, you'd call it the instruction pointer. The PC might seem obvious, but if you think about it for a moment, you'll realize that someone had to have invented it. It's not totally obvious. And as far as I can tell, the inventor is unknown. Note also that the featured program does not have a PC, so there are things it can't do that a normal CPU can do.