Correcting Microsoft's Bilski Amicus Brief -- How Do Computers Really Work?

[iBot]

Groklaw member PolR sent me some observations on Microsoft's Bilski amicus brief [PDF; text] submitted to the US Supreme Court in the case In Re Bilski. Oral argument will be on November 9th. Presumably their arguments will be before the court. But are they technically accurate? PolR thinks they are not, and he decided to correct some materials in it, both some historical facts and the description of how computers today work.
Is it true, as Microsoft wrote in its brief, that computers are at heart just a "collection of tiny on-off switches--usually in the form of transistors"? Or that "The role of software is simply to automate the reconfiguration of the electronic pathways that was once done manually by the human operators of ENIAC"? Are computers just a modern equivalent to the telegraph or the Jacquard loom, a series of on-off switches, as the brief asserts?
Or is that hyberbole, and technically inaccurate hyperbole?How do modern computers really work? What impact did the discovery of the universal Turing machine have on how computers work, compared to prior special-purpose computers like ENIAC? What are the differences between how analogue and digital computers work? We have heard from the lawyers, but what about from those whose area of expertise is the tech? I think you'll see how this technical information ties in with the questions the US Supreme Court would like answered -- presumably accurately -- as to whether or not software should be patentable and whether computers become special purpose machines when software is run on them. Po1R's collected some very useful references from experts. Feel free to add more references in your comments.

More...