D Criteria for Improvements in each generation concentrated are
  • Smaller
  • Cheaper
  • More powerful
  • More efficient
  • Reliable devices

FIRST GENERATION OF COMPUTERS

  • TIME PERIOD  : 1940's-1950's
  • TECHNOLOGY  : Vacuum Tubes
  • SIZE AND SPEED  : Huge (entire room size)
  •       Slow speed
  • LANGUAGE USED  : Machine language
  • COST  : very high (sys & working)
  • EXAMPLE  : UNIVAC and ENIAC
  • OTHER FEATURES
  • More electricity.
  • More heat generation
  • Inputs punched cards & paper tape
  • Outputs printouts

SECOND GENERATION

  • TIME PERIOD  : 1950's- 1960's
  • TECHNOLOGY  : Transistors
  • SIZE AND SPEED  : Lesser size and increased speed
  • LANGUAGE USED  : Assembly language(COBOL & FORTRAN)
  • COST  : Cost decreased
  • OTHER FEATURES  : More efficient and reliable.
  •  Heat damages computer but,
  •  Vast improvement  the vacuum tube.
  •  I/p à punched cards
  • O/p à printouts for output.
  • EXAMPLE  : UNIVAC 1108, IBM 1401, CDC 1604
 

THIRD GENERATION

  • TIME PERIOD  : late 1960's-1970's
  • TECHNOLOGY USED  : Integrated Circuit  (SSI & MSI)
  • SIZE AND SPEED  : Size Lesser & Speed further increased
  • LANGUAGE USED  : OS was developed.
  • COST  : Cost decreased further
  • I/P  : keyboards
  • O/P   : Monitors
  • EXAMPLE   : IBM-360 series, Honeywell Model 316, Honeywell – 6000 series, CDC – 1700.
  FOURTH GENERATION
  • TIME PERIOD   : 1970's-today
  • TECHNOLOGY USED   : Microprocessor (LSI)
  • SIZE AND SPEED    : Reduced size & tremendous speed
  • LANGUAGE USED  : High Level Languages (PASCAL,                                                COBOL, C, C++, JAVA)
  • COST  : Reduced Cost
  • OTHER FEATURES    : GUI development, Hand held devices.
  •      Multiprocessing & Multiprogramming.
  •      Parallel Processing & Computing.
  •  EXAMPLE   : Intel 4004, Apple Macintosh

FIFTH GENERATION

  • TIME PERIOD  : under development
  • TECHNOLOGY USED   : Artificial Intelligence (VLSI)
  • SIZE AND SPEED  : Reduced size and tremendous speed
  • LANGUAGE USED   : Based on Artificial intelligence
  • COST   : Reduced Cost
  • OTHER FEATURES  : bridges gap between thinking & computing
  • Heavy parallelism
  • EXAMPLE   : Parallel Inference Machine