Back in the dirt ages, computers were enormous things. Some of them were the size of your hand. Really enormous ones could be the size of your torso. They hooked up to household power, hundreds of volts (and people TOUCHED these things!). They were so inefficient they needed cooling fans, like they were some sort of information furnace.
These days we kind of forget computers exist, they're just there, woven into the nanomaterials of our homes and furniture and appliances. Only those of us who write software for them really notice them. This can be a problem, if you've had one rice-grain-sized compute unit go berserk and start sending out spurious notifications. I'm wandering around the building with a scanner, but I did too good a job implementing stealth mode, I can't find the little blighter. I really hope I don't have to EMP-burst the house (again) to make this one JUST. SHUT. UP.