History Of Computer

The computer as we know it today had its beginning with a 19th century English mathematics professor name Charles Babbage.

The computer today had its beginning with a 19th century English mathematics professor name Charles Babbage. He designed the Analytical Engine and it was this design that the basic framework of the computers of today are based on.

Generally speaking, computers can be classified into

three generations. Each generation lasted for a certain period of time, and each gave us either a new and improved computer or an improvement to the existing computer, bringing forth the fourth and third generations of computer.

First generation: 1937 – 1946 - In 1937 the first electronic digital computer was built by Dr. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. It was called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). In 1943 an electronic computer name the Colossus was built for the military. Other developments continued until in 1946 the first general– purpose digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was built. It is said that this computer weighed 30 tons, and had 18,000 vacuum tubes which was used for processing. When this computer was turned on for the first time lights dim in sections of Philadelphia. Computers of this generation could only perform single task, and they had no operating system.

Second generation: 1947 – 1962 - This generation of computers used transistors instead of vacuum tubes which were more reliable. In 1951 the first computer for commercial use was introduced to the public; the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC 1). In 1953 the International Business Machine (IBM) 650 and 700 series computers made their mark in the computer world. During this generation of computers over 100 computer programming languages were developed, computers had memory and operating systems. Storage media such as tape and disk were in use also were printers for output.

Third generation: 1963 - present - The invention of integrated circuit brought us the third generation of computers. With this invention computers became smaller, more powerful more reliable and they are able to run many different programs at the same time. In1980 Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-Dos) was born and in 1981 IBM introduced the personal computer (PC) for home and office use. Three years later Apple gave us the Macintosh computer with its icon driven interface and the 90s gave us Windows operating system.

4th & 5th – GENERATION COMPUTER (1975 – 1990 – Present)

Fourth Generation: Very Large Scale Integration (1975 to present) The  fourth  generation  computers  use  VLSI  chips  for  both  CPU  and  memory.  The VLSI technology allowed millions of transistors on a single chip. This high density of fabrication directly affected the size and sped of the machine. With heavy drop in price, it was feasible for  single individual  to  have  his/her  own  computer. Some of the achievements  in  this generations are:

·                     RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) was introduced.

·                     Superscalar computers and personal computers were introduced.

·                     User friendly and fast computer with virtual technology is available in the market.

·                     Progress in neural  network and AI has helped to produce intelligent machines that the  fifth  generation  computers  are under  development  stage.  Highly  developed can learn, adopt and analyze the knowledge itself.

·                     Improvement on distributed system, and network communication system.

·                     Examples of fourth generation computers are: Apple Macintosh, IBM PCs etc.

Fifth Generation: (Present and Beyond)

·                     The fifth generation computers are under development stage. Highly developed countries such as have undertaken projects to design and develop such computers. These computers  will  use ULSI (Ultra  Large Scale Integration)  chips.

·                     There will  be progress  on  intelligent  system  and  expert system  to  develop  intelligent  computers which  can  have vision,  learning  ability,  object  recognition  and  synthesis ability, natural language understanding ability.

·                     The  input  and  output  of  the  computes  will  be  in  the  form of  speech  and  graphic