HISTORY, EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER

The evolution of computers goes long back ago and its very interesting as well as quite important for understanding the working of computer.

Long back about 4ooB.c first every computing instrument was developed which can add and subtract. graduaklly afterwards there was importance of an computing instrument. pascal first computer came in 1642and other scientist loike napiers and leibnitz done significant work in this field which eventually led to present day computer. MARK-1 was the first modern computer. British mathematician AUGUSTA ADA BYRON was the first ever programmer. BASIC was introduced in 1965. IBM pc was introduced in 1981. First graphical computer "MAC" came in 1984 and microsoft was introduced in 1985. windows 3.1 become most popular in 1992 bthe first general computer was ENIAC( ELECTRONIC NUMERICAL INTEGRATOR AND CALCULATOR). JOHN VON NEUMAN gave the concept of stored program.

COMPUTER GENERATIONS:-

1st GENERATION:- It started in 1950 with appearance of UNIVAC-1. in this generation vacuum tubes were used, and there memory were made of thin tubes of liquid mercury and magnetic drums. computer uses the stored program concept in this period. the idea was to store the program in separate memory but since the vacuum tubes were very costly so it discouraged the manufacturers to use it and instead they electrostatic memories. the speed of this age of computers was very slow as compared today and size was very large(about two rooms) also it required large cooling towers as there was lot of heat produced by vacuum tubes. the cost was so high that it was almost impossible for general people to afford it.

2nd GENERATION:- the greatest problem of the computers was such a big size and slow processing. a revolutionary technology known as transistor was being introduced in this era. transistor replaced the vacuum tubes and it used ferrite core as memory. the size was considerably reduced but was still about(half a room). generally germanium semiconductor was used which was more reliable and faster.in this period HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGE, COBOL, FORTRAN AND ALGOL were developed. greater reliability and faster processing led to development of the OPERATING SYSTEM.

3rd GENERATION:- Since the size was still very large it created problems. In this period
main development was introduction of the INTEGRATED CHIP. Now integrated chip is a chip which contain a number of transistors and this was made possible by technology of SMALL/MEDIUM SCALE INTEGRATION. it was possible to fabricate 10-100 transistors on a chip. this generation used semiconductor memories, it led to development of DBMS( DATA BASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM). use of punch cards and magnetic tape was also used. on-line systems were also developed in this period. even the introduction of CACHE memory was the milestone in this period.

4th GENERATION:- This generation marked the introduction of microprocessors which we are even using today in our computers. A Microprocessor is a integrated chip which contain whole of the central processing unit and more than 50,000 transistors on a single chip and this was made possible by LSI/VLSI ( LARGE/VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION). since the processing was increased 1000 times and even the cost was reduced it enabled the manufacturers to provide the personal computer to local people. even the cooling problem was solved as all the transistors are on a single chip and there is a small fan provided behind it which keeps it cool this can even be seen in your computer cpu. query language, report and spread sheets, graphics, computer aided design were major software development of this age. it revolutionalised the life of peoples.

5th GENERATION:- it started with major innovations in computer architecture like parallel processing, intelligent programming, application of artificial intelligence and knowledge based system. the ultra large scale integration made it possible to develop 100MHZ to 1GHZ PROCESSOR. This is our current generation and still a lot of work is going on.
today CDs, floppy disk, zip drive, high capacity hard drives can all be used in personal computers. Microsoft also fuelled in development by providing windows the graphical user interface which use DOS(DISK OPERATING SYSTEM). Continuous development led to pentium high processing computers which we are using today. latestly core 2 duo hgas been introduced and various operating systems like windows millenium,vista,XP,95 and linux etc are available to us. also we have laptops with large mem0ries .even external memories are there which provide good amount of storage.