I was an assistant for a study that tested people's memory and 'digital memory'. We showed people info on a computer and said they'd need to recall it. Half of those people were told they'd have access to the computer to reference it. Sometimes we changed the location of the data so they'd look where it is but it was gone.

I don't remember the exact set up, but the result was effectively that people remembered where the info was stored, rather than the info itself. So like you explained, the computer is just external memory. It would make sense that its also external inputs, outputs, etc.