First Generation
The First generation of computers began back in the 1940's as a byproduct of the second world war. In 1941 a German engineer by the name of Konrad Zuse had developed the Z3 to help design airplanes and missiles, in 1943 the British invented the Colossus in order to decipher German coded messages.
In 1944 an American engineer Howard H. Aiken developed an all electronic calculator. Roughly half the size of a football field and containing up 500 miles of wiring The Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or Mark I for short, was intended to create ballistic charts for the Navy. Also to come out of the US was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC. The ENICA, unlike the Colossus or Mark I was a General purpose computer that was capable of computing 1,000 times faster that the Mark I. Last of all was the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC for short). The greatest achievement for the EDVAC was its ability to be stopped at any point during use and then resumed. |
Second Generation
The second Generation of computers was soured on by the invention of transistors 1948, this allowed for much smaller machines to be manufactured with considerably more computing power. These new computers where developed for atomic energy laboratories.
The second generation of computers saw the introduction of many of components and peripherals such as printers,tape storage, disk storage and so on. it wasent untill the introduction of stored programs and programming language gave computers the flexibilty needed for buisness use which help computers grow in use and popularity |
|
Third Generation
The third generation began in 1958 when Jack Kilby invented the Integrated circuit, three components (and later more where added) all combined on a small silicon disc, this eliminated the overheating problem that transistors caused and allowed computers to shrink even further, thus becoming even more accessible.
Also introduced was the use of an operating system that allowed computers to run multiple programs at once. |
Fourth Generation
In the following years computers shrank considerably in size thank to the invention of the Large scale integration, very large scale integration, and ultra-large scale integration chips which allowed Millions of components onto a single chip. this is what led to the invention of the microprocessor, unlike the Integrated circuit which had to be programmed to fit a single purpose, a microprocessor could be programmed to fit a wide range of uses.
With computers becoming easier and cheaper to produce, they where no longer produced just for large business and in the mid 70's companies began to release use friendly machines such as the Commodore and early apple computers. In 1981 IBM introduced the Personal computer for schools and home use. over the next decade apple would release the Macintosh that allowed users to move screen icons with a mouse rather than typing keyboard commands and computers would continue to shrink leading to the release of laptops. the next step for computers was linking multiple machines up to share memory, software and information leading to Local area networks and then the Internet. |
|
Bibliography:
Lilly, J . (). Computers: History and Development . Available: http://www.dia.eui.upm.es/asignatu/sis_op1/comp_hd/comp_hd.htm. Last accessed 14th Feb 2016.
Unknown. (2009). History of Computer Development. Available: http://wikieducator.org/History_of_Computer_Development. Last accessed 14th Feb 2016.
Lilly, J . (). Computers: History and Development . Available: http://www.dia.eui.upm.es/asignatu/sis_op1/comp_hd/comp_hd.htm. Last accessed 14th Feb 2016.
Unknown. (2009). History of Computer Development. Available: http://wikieducator.org/History_of_Computer_Development. Last accessed 14th Feb 2016.