FIVE COMPUTER GENERATIONS
First Generation Computers (1951-1958)
The first generation of computers used vacuum tubes as their main logic elements; punched cards to input and externally store data; and rotating magnetic drums for internal storage of data in programs written in machine language (instructions written as a string of 0s and 1s) or assembly language (a language that allowed the programmer to write instructions in a kind of shorthand that would then be "translated" by another program called a compiler into machine language).
The first generation of computers used vacuum tubes as their main logic elements; punched cards to input and externally store data; and rotating magnetic drums for internal storage of data in programs written in machine language (instructions written as a string of 0s and 1s) or assembly language (a language that allowed the programmer to write instructions in a kind of shorthand that would then be "translated" by another program called a compiler into machine language).
In addition, first-generation computers often broke down because of burned-out vacuum tubes.
First generation computers also needed many experts to operate them.
In 1945, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly developed the first operational electronic digital computer, called ENIAC, for US Army. ENIAC was over 1000 times faster than Mark 1, and could perform 5000 additions per second.
ENIAC had more than 1800 vacuum tubes, and took up to 1800 square feet of space. In addition, the electrical current ENIAC required could power more than a thousand modern computers. Today, ENIAC’s technology could fit in a modern wristwatch.
In 1951 the UNIVAC-1 became the first commercially available electronic computer. This computer was designed by Eckert and Mauchly (the designers of the ENIAC) and built by the Remington Rand corporation. The first of these computers was delivered to US. Census Bureau.
Between 1951 and 1953 magnetic core memory was developed. This memory consists of tiny ferrite “donuts” that were arranged on a lattice of wires. The polarity of their magnetization could be change or detected by passing current through the wires. This allowed each lattice point store one “bit” – either 0 or 1. Magnetic core memory was the fastest type of memory until the late 1980’s.
First generation computers also needed many experts to operate them.
In 1945, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly developed the first operational electronic digital computer, called ENIAC, for US Army. ENIAC was over 1000 times faster than Mark 1, and could perform 5000 additions per second.
ENIAC had more than 1800 vacuum tubes, and took up to 1800 square feet of space. In addition, the electrical current ENIAC required could power more than a thousand modern computers. Today, ENIAC’s technology could fit in a modern wristwatch.
In 1951 the UNIVAC-1 became the first commercially available electronic computer. This computer was designed by Eckert and Mauchly (the designers of the ENIAC) and built by the Remington Rand corporation. The first of these computers was delivered to US. Census Bureau.
Between 1951 and 1953 magnetic core memory was developed. This memory consists of tiny ferrite “donuts” that were arranged on a lattice of wires. The polarity of their magnetization could be change or detected by passing current through the wires. This allowed each lattice point store one “bit” – either 0 or 1. Magnetic core memory was the fastest type of memory until the late 1980’s.
Second Generation Computers (1959-1963)
In the 1940s, discovered that a class of crystalline mineral materials called semiconductors could be used in the design of a device called a transistor to replace vacuum tubes. Magnetic cores (very small donut-shaped magnets that could be polarized in one of two directions to represent data) strung on wire within the computer became the primary internal storage technology. Magnetic tape and disks began to replace punched cards as external storage devices.
In the 1940s, discovered that a class of crystalline mineral materials called semiconductors could be used in the design of a device called a transistor to replace vacuum tubes. Magnetic cores (very small donut-shaped magnets that could be polarized in one of two directions to represent data) strung on wire within the computer became the primary internal storage technology. Magnetic tape and disks began to replace punched cards as external storage devices.
High-level programming languages (program instructions that could be written with simple words and mathematical expressions), like FORTRAN and COBOL, made computers more accessible to scientists and businesses.
instead of vacuum tubes, second generation computers used transistors an exiting new invention at the time. John Barden, Walter Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor. A transistor is a small, solid-state component designed to monitor the flow of the electric current.
instead of vacuum tubes, second generation computers used transistors an exiting new invention at the time. John Barden, Walter Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor. A transistor is a small, solid-state component designed to monitor the flow of the electric current.
TransistorWere smaller, faster, cheaper, required less power, and produce less heat than vacuum tubes. In computers, a transistor functions as an electronic switch or bridge. Transistors play an important role in electronic circuits. Circuits help make up electronic systems, and electronic systems are what make electronic computing possible. Transistors allowed computers to communicate over telephone lines. The transistor gave way to the concept of parallel processor and multiprogramming.
1961
Grace hopper, the woman that found the first computer bug, finishes developing COBOL.
1964
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), founded by Ken Olsen, release the first minicomputer, the PDP-8.
1965
Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College developed BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) as a computer language to help teach people how to program.
The THIRD GENERATION(1963-1974)
Grace hopper, the woman that found the first computer bug, finishes developing COBOL.
1964
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), founded by Ken Olsen, release the first minicomputer, the PDP-8.
1965
Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College developed BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) as a computer language to help teach people how to program.
The THIRD GENERATION(1963-1974)
•Individual transistors were replace by integrated circuits.
•Magnetic tape and disks completely replace punch cards.
•Magnetic core internal memories began to give way to new form, metal-oxide semiconductor.Third-generation computers were built between 1963-1974.
In the third generation, computers relied on a new technology called the integrated circuits. The integrated circuit is a single wafer or chip that can hold many transistors and electronic circuits.
1959
Jack Kilby invented the monolithic integrated circuit which is still widely used in electronics system.
1968
Intel was founded by Robert Noyce. He is one of the inventors of the integrated circuit.
Intel was founded by Robert Noyce. He is one of the inventors of the integrated circuit.
1969
ARPANET is set-up. ARPANET later becomes the Internet.
1972
1972
The C programming language is developed at AT&T Bell Labs by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritche. The UNIX operating system, also written at Bell Labs, is rewritten using C.
The FOURTH GENERATION(1979-Present)
•Intel Corporation designed the first tiny computer on a chip, it was called the microprocessor.•Microprocessor is an integrated circuit built on a tiny piece of silicon.
1975
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or MITS produced the first PC. They named the computer kit Altair 8080, after the Star Trek episode, “A Voyage to Altair”.
•Bill Gates and Paul Allen foundedthe Microsoft.
•In April 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded APPLE COMPUTERS.
1978
VisiCalc is released. This is the first spreadsheet program and it made microcomputers useful to business.
VisiCalc is released. This is the first spreadsheet program and it made microcomputers useful to business.
1979
The first microcomputer word processor, Word Star, is released.
FIFTH GENERATION COMPUTER
The first microcomputer word processor, Word Star, is released.
FIFTH GENERATION COMPUTER
For the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, see Cinema of China-The rise of the Fifth Generation. The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" (see history of computing hardware) which was supposed to perform much calculation using massive parallelism. It was to be the end result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and usable artificial intelligence capabilities. The term fifth generation was intended to convey the system as being a leap beyond existing machines. Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation; transistors and diodes, the second; integrated circuits, the third; and those using microprocessors, the fourth. Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs for added performance. Opinions about its outcome are divided: Either it was a failure, or it was ahead of its time. History
Background and design philosophy Throughout these multiple generations since the 1980s, Japan had largely been a follower in terms of computing advancement, building computers following US and British leads. The Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to attempt to break out of this follow-the-leader pattern, and in the mid-1970s started looking, on a small scale, into the future of computing. They asked the Japan Information Processing Development Center(JIPDEC) to indicate a number of future directions, and in 1979 offered a three-year contract to carry out more in-depth studies along with industry and academia. It was during this period that the term "fifth-generation computer" started to be used. The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were: Inference computer technologies for knowledge processing Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases High performance workstations Distributed functional computer technologies Super-computers for scientific calculation The project imagined a parallel processing computer running on top of massive databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem) using a logic programming language to define and access the data. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies. Implementation So ingrained was the belief that parallel computing was the future of all performance gains that the Fifth-Generation project generated a great deal of apprehension in the computer field. After having seen the Japanese take over the consumer electronics field during the 1970s and apparently doing the same in the automotive world during the 1980s, the Japanese in the 1980s had a reputation for invincibility. Soon parallel projects were set up in the US as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), in England as Alvey, and in Europe as the European Strategic Program of Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT, as well as ECRC (European Computer Research Centre) in Munich, a collaboration between ICL in Britain, Bull in France, and Siemens in Germany. Five running Parallel Inference Machines (PIM) were eventually produced: PIM/m, PIM/p, PIM/i, PIM/k, PIM/c. The project also produced applications to run on these systems, such as the parallel database management system Kappa, the legal reasoning system HELIC-II, and the automated theorem prover MGTP, as well as applications to Bioinformatics.
Failure The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines). The project did produce a new generation of promising Japanese researchers. But after the FGCS Project, MITI stopped funding large-scale computer research projects, and the research momentum developed by the FGCS Project dissipated. A primary problem was the choice of concurrent logic programming as the bridge between the parallel computer architecture and the use of logic as a knowledge representation and problem solving language for AI applications. This never happened cleanly; a number of languages were developed, all with their own limitations. In particular, the committed choice of concurrent logic programming interfered with the logical semantics of the languages. Another problem was that existing CPU performance quickly pushed through the "obvious" barriers that experts perceived in the 1980s, and the value of parallel computing quickly dropped to the point where it was for some time used only in niche situations. Although a number of workstations of increasing capacity were designed and built over the project's lifespan, they generally found themselves soon outperformed by "off the shelf" units available commercially. The project also suffered from being on the wrong side of the technology curve. During its lifespan, Apple Computer introduced the GUI to the masses; the internet enabled locally stored databases to become distributed; and even simple research projects provided better real-world results in data mining, Google being a good example. Moreover the project found that the promises of logic programming were largely negated by the use of committed choice. At the end of the ten year period the project had spent through over 50 billion yen[citation needed] and was terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, and the entire concept was overtaken by the Internet. In spite of the possibility of considering the project a failure, many of the approaches envisioned in the Fifth-Generation project, such as logic programming distributed over massive knowledge-bases, are now being re-interpreted in current technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) employs several layers of logic-based knowledge representation systems, while many flavors of parallel computing proliferate, including Multi-core (computing) at the low-end and Massively parallel processing at the high end. It can be argued that the Fifth-Generation project was aimed at solving a problem that was ahead of its time.
Background and design philosophy Throughout these multiple generations since the 1980s, Japan had largely been a follower in terms of computing advancement, building computers following US and British leads. The Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to attempt to break out of this follow-the-leader pattern, and in the mid-1970s started looking, on a small scale, into the future of computing. They asked the Japan Information Processing Development Center(JIPDEC) to indicate a number of future directions, and in 1979 offered a three-year contract to carry out more in-depth studies along with industry and academia. It was during this period that the term "fifth-generation computer" started to be used. The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were: Inference computer technologies for knowledge processing Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases High performance workstations Distributed functional computer technologies Super-computers for scientific calculation The project imagined a parallel processing computer running on top of massive databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem) using a logic programming language to define and access the data. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies. Implementation So ingrained was the belief that parallel computing was the future of all performance gains that the Fifth-Generation project generated a great deal of apprehension in the computer field. After having seen the Japanese take over the consumer electronics field during the 1970s and apparently doing the same in the automotive world during the 1980s, the Japanese in the 1980s had a reputation for invincibility. Soon parallel projects were set up in the US as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), in England as Alvey, and in Europe as the European Strategic Program of Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT, as well as ECRC (European Computer Research Centre) in Munich, a collaboration between ICL in Britain, Bull in France, and Siemens in Germany. Five running Parallel Inference Machines (PIM) were eventually produced: PIM/m, PIM/p, PIM/i, PIM/k, PIM/c. The project also produced applications to run on these systems, such as the parallel database management system Kappa, the legal reasoning system HELIC-II, and the automated theorem prover MGTP, as well as applications to Bioinformatics.
Failure The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines). The project did produce a new generation of promising Japanese researchers. But after the FGCS Project, MITI stopped funding large-scale computer research projects, and the research momentum developed by the FGCS Project dissipated. A primary problem was the choice of concurrent logic programming as the bridge between the parallel computer architecture and the use of logic as a knowledge representation and problem solving language for AI applications. This never happened cleanly; a number of languages were developed, all with their own limitations. In particular, the committed choice of concurrent logic programming interfered with the logical semantics of the languages. Another problem was that existing CPU performance quickly pushed through the "obvious" barriers that experts perceived in the 1980s, and the value of parallel computing quickly dropped to the point where it was for some time used only in niche situations. Although a number of workstations of increasing capacity were designed and built over the project's lifespan, they generally found themselves soon outperformed by "off the shelf" units available commercially. The project also suffered from being on the wrong side of the technology curve. During its lifespan, Apple Computer introduced the GUI to the masses; the internet enabled locally stored databases to become distributed; and even simple research projects provided better real-world results in data mining, Google being a good example. Moreover the project found that the promises of logic programming were largely negated by the use of committed choice. At the end of the ten year period the project had spent through over 50 billion yen[citation needed] and was terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, and the entire concept was overtaken by the Internet. In spite of the possibility of considering the project a failure, many of the approaches envisioned in the Fifth-Generation project, such as logic programming distributed over massive knowledge-bases, are now being re-interpreted in current technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) employs several layers of logic-based knowledge representation systems, while many flavors of parallel computing proliferate, including Multi-core (computing) at the low-end and Massively parallel processing at the high end. It can be argued that the Fifth-Generation project was aimed at solving a problem that was ahead of its time.
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