T.I.C. Activity: The Computer Generations (Windows Stage Preparatoria Bilingüe)

Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Preparatoria #7 Unidad Puentes
November 3rd 2012

Index

First Generation
Second Generation
Third Generation
Fourth Generation
Fifth Generation

First generation
The first generation of computers is said by some to have started in 1946 with ENIAC, the first 'computer' to use electronic valves (ie. vacuum tubes). Others would say it started in May1949 with the introduction of EDSAC, the first stored program computer. Whichever, the distinguishing feature of the first generation computers was the use of electronic valves.
OECD figures indicate that by the end of 1958 about 2,500 first generation computers were installed world-wide. (Compare this with the number of PCs shipped world-wide in just the third quarter of 2006, quoted as 59.1million units by research co Two key events took place in the summer of 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. One was the completion of the ENIAC. The other was the delivery of a course of lectures on "The Theory and Techniques of Electronic Digital Computers". In particular, they described the need to store the instructions to manipulate data in thecomputer along with the data. The design features worked out by John von Neumann and his mpany Gartner)

Two key events took place in the summer of 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. One was the completion of the ENIAC. The other was the delivery of a course of lectures on "The Theory and Techniques of Electronic

Digital Computers". Inparticular, they described the need to store the instructions to manipulate data in the computer along with the data. The design features worked out by John von Neumann and his colleagues and described in these lectures laid the foundation for the development of the first generation of computers. That just left the technical problems!
One of the projects to commence in 1946 was the construction of theIAS computer at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. The IAS computer used a random access electrostatic storage system and parallel binary arithmetic. It was very fast when compared with the delay line computers, with their sequential memories and serial arithmetic.

The Princeton group was liberal with information about their computer and before long many universities around the worldwere building their own, close copies. One of these was the SILLIAC at Sydney University in Australia.

Second Generation
By 1948, the invention of the transistor greatly changed the computer's development. The transistor replaced the large, cumbersome vacuum tube in televisions, radios and computers. As a result, the size of electronic machinery has been shrinking ever since. Thetransistor was at work in the computer by 1956. Coupled with early advances in magnetic-core memory, transistors led to second generation computers that were smaller, faster, more reliable and more energy-efficient than their predecessors. The first large-scale machines to take advantage of this transistor technology were early supercomputers, Stretch by IBM and LARC by Sperry-Rand. These computers,both developed for atomic energy laboratories, could handle an enormous amount of data, a capability much in demand by atomic scientists. The machines were costly, however, and tended to be too powerful for the business sector's computing needs, thereby limiting their attractiveness. Only two LARCs were ever installed: one in the Lawrence Radiation Labs in Livermore, California, for which thecomputer was named (Livermore Atomic Research Computer) and the other at the U.S. Navy Research and Development Center in Washington, D.C. Another addition in second generation computers was the introduction of assembly language. When assembly language replaced machine language, abbreviated

programming codes to replaced long, difficult binary codes (Gersting 35).

Throughout the early...