COMPUTER

GENERATIONS

FIRST GENERATION (VACUUM TUBES)

• Computers were huge, slow, expensive, and often undependable.

• Use thousands of vacuum tubes, which took up a lot of space and gave off a great deal of heat just like light bulbs do.

• It's (VACUUM TUBES) purpose was to act like an amplifier and a switch.

COMPUTERS DURING 1ST GENERATION

• ENIAC• EDVAC (ELECTRONIC DISCRETE VARIABLE

AUTOMATIC COMPUTER)• UNIVAC (UNIVERSAL AUTOMATIC

COMPUTER)

SECOND GENERATION (TRANSISTOR)

• John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain – invented the transistor the would replace the vacuum tubes forever.

• Transistor was faster, more reliable, smaller, and much cheaper to build than a vacuum tube.

• One transistor replaced the equivalent of 40 vacuum tubes.

THIRD GENERATION (INTEGRATED CIRCUIT)

• Packs a huge number of transistors onto a single wafer of silicon.

• Robert Noyce of Fairchild Corporation and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments independently discovered the amazing attributes of integrated circuits.

• Placing such large numbers of transistors on a single chip vastly increased the power of a single computer and lowered its cost considerably.

FOURTH GENERATION (MICROPROCESSOR)

•

• Microprocessor - a single chip that could do all the processing of a full-scale computer.

• Ted Hoff- invented a chip the size of a pencil eraser that could do all the computing and logic work of a computer.

• The microprocessor was made to be used in calculators, not computers. It led, however, to the invention of personal computers, or microcomputers.

FIFTH GENERATION (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)

• Artificial intelligence, are still in development, though there are some applications, such as voice recognition, that are being used today. The use of parallel processing and superconductors is helping to make artificial intelligence a reality. Quantum computation and molecular and nanotechnology will radically change the face of computers in years to come. The goal of fifth-generation computing is to develop devices that respond to natural language input and are capable of learning and self-organization.

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING:

• Why did the ENIAC and other computers like it give off so much heat? (Be very specific)

• How was space travel made possible through the invention of transistors?

• Intel was started by who?• What characteristics made the transistors

better than the vacuum tube?• What did the microprocessor allow the

computers to do? and What was the microprocessor's original purpose?