The Five Generations Of Computers

First Generation (1940-1956) Vacuum Tubes

         First generation computers are based on vaccum tubes. These computers are very large and requires a lot of space of installation. Since thousands of vaccum tubes are used they generate large amount of heat. They were very expensive to operate and use large amount of electricity. First generation computers are relaid on binary coded language.

Second Generation (1956-1963) Transistors

     Second generation computers were based on transistor technology instead of vaccum tubes. A transistor is made up of semiconductor material like germanium and silicon. It usually had three leads and perform electrical language. These machines are smaller compared with first generation computers. They produce less heat but still require air conditioning. The programming assembly language was also invented in this second generation of computers.

Third Generation (1964-1971) Integrated Circuits

           The IC(Integrated Circuits) technology was used in this third generation computers. A small IC chip(5mm square size) is fabricated with large number of electronic components like transistors, capicitors, diodes etc. Thus the IC technology was named as small scale integration(SSI). They consume very less power and used to genetare less heat. In some cases it still requires air conditioning. In this case maintenance cost was low because failure rate of hardware was very low.

Fourth Generation (1971-Present) Microprocessors

            The microchip technology was introduced in this generation of computers. With the advancement in IC technology large scale integration(LSI) were developed. It was possible to integrate over 30,000 or more components on a single LSI chip. After LSI, the very large scale integration(VLSI) chip was  developed and hereby development of microprocessor is possible. It is possible to fabricate more than one million components on a single VLSI chip. Using this VLSI technology, the entire cpu is designed on a single silicon chip. The use of microprocessors as cpu is also known as microcomputers. Thus, fourth generation computers are also known as microcomputer generation computers.

Fifth Generation (Present and Beyond) Artificial Intelligence

            The main drawback of first to fourth generation computers is that the computers have not their own thinking power. These are totally depends upon the instructions given by the users. Fifth generation computers do not exist and are supposed to be ideal computers. In these computers ultra large scale integrated circuits(ULSIC) technology and Airtificial Intelligence (AI) technology will be used.

The scientists are working to design such computers that will have the following features:
Having their own thinking power
Making decisions themselves
Having capabilities of learning
Having large capacity of internal storage
Having extra high processing speed
Having capabilities of parallel processing.



By RR Team

Click to Enlarge the Image

Pattabhi Foundation