The Generations of Computers

The development of computers started with mechanical and elec-

tromechanical devices (17th through 19th century) and has progressed
through four generations of computers.

Mechanical Devices
One of the earliest mechanical calculating devices was the Pascaline,
invented in 1642 by the French philosopher and mathematician
Blaise Pascal. The Pascaline was a complicated set of gears that oper-
ated similarly to a clock. It was designed to only perform addition.
Unfortunately, due to manufacturing problems, Pascal never got the
device to work properly.

Blaise Pascal
1623 – 1662

The Pascaline was a mechanical calculating device

invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642
Later in the 17th century Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a famous
mathematician, invented a device that was supposed to be able to add
and subtract, as well as multiply, divide, and calculate square roots.
His device, the Stepped Reckoner, included a cylindrical wheel called
the Leibniz wheel and a moveable carriage that was used to enter the
number of digits in the multiplicand. However, because of mechani-
cally unreliable parts, the device tended to jam and malfunction.
Gottfried Wilhelm
von Leibniz
1646 – 1716

The Stepped Reckoner was another early attempt at

creating a mechanical calculating device
In 1822 Charles Babbage began work on the Difference Engine, which
was intended to calculate numbers to the 20th place and then print
them at 44 digits per minute. The original purpose of this machine
was to produce tables of numbers that would be used by ships’ naviga-
tors. At the time, navigation tables were often highly inaccurate due to
calculation errors and a number of ships were known to have been lost
Charles Babbage at sea because of these errors. Although never built, the ideas for the
1792 – 1871 Difference Engine led to the design of Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
The Analytical Engine, designed around 1833, was supposed to
perform a variety of calculations by following a set of instructions, or
program, stored on punched cards. During processing, the Analytical
Engine was planned to store information in a memory unit that would
allow it to make decisions and then carry out instructions based on

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 those decisions. For example, when comparing two numbers, it could
The History of be programmed to determine which was larger and then follow an
Punched Cards appropriate set of instructions. The Analytical Engine was also never
built, but its design served as a model for the modern computer.
Punched cards originally pro-
vided instructions for weav-
ing looms. In 1810 Joseph
Jacquard, a French weaver,
placed punched cards in his
looms so that as the cards
passed through the loom in
sequence, needles passed
through the holes and picked
up threads of the correct color
or texture.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine was designed as a

calculating machine that used punched cards to store
information
Babbage’s chief collaborator on the Analytical Engine was Ada
Byron, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron. Interested in
mathematics, Lady Byron was a sponsor of the Analytical Engine and
one of the first people to realize its power and significance. She also
wrote of its achievements in order to gain support for it. Ada Byron is
often called the first programmer because she wrote a program based
on the design of the Analytical Engine.
Babbage had hoped that the Analytical Engine would be able to
Ada Byron think. Ada Byron, however, said that the Engine could never “origi-
1815 – 1852 nate anything,” meaning that she did not believe that a machine, no
matter how powerful, could think. To this day her statement about
computing machines remains true.

Electro-Mechanical Devices
By the end of the 19th century, U.S. Census officials were concerned
about the time it took to tabulate the continuously increasing number
of Americans. This counting was done every 10 years, as required
by the Constitution. However, the Census of 1880 took nine years to
compile which made the figures out of date by the time they were
published.
Herman Hollerith In response to a contest sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau,
1860 – 1929
Herman Hollerith invented a tabulating machine that used electric-
Based on the success of his ity rather than mechanical gears. Holes representing information to
tabulating machine, Herman be tabulated were punched in cards, with the location of each hole
Hollerith started the Tabulating
representing a specific piece of information (male, female, age, etc.).
Machine Company in 1896. In
1924, the company was taken The cards were then inserted into the machine and metal pins used
over by International Business to open and close electrical circuits. If a circuit was closed, a counter
Machines (IBM). was increased by one.

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 Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine, invented for
the Census of 1890, used electricity instead of gears to
perform calculations
Hollerith’s machine was immensely successful. The general count
of the population, then 63 million, took only six weeks to compile.
Although the full statistical analysis took seven years, it was still
an improvement over the nine years it took to compile the previous
census.
In 1944, the Mark I was completed by a team from International
Business Machines (IBM) and Harvard University under the leader-
ship of Howard Aiken. The Mark I used mechanical telephone relay
switches to store information and accepted data on punched cards.
Because it could not make decisions about the data it processed, the
Mark I was not a computer but instead a highly sophisticated calcula-
tor. Nevertheless, it was impressive in size, measuring over 51 feet in
length and weighing 5 tons. It also had over 750,000 parts, many of
Howard Aiken them moving mechanical parts which made the Mark I not only huge
1900 – 1973
but unreliable.

John Atanasoff The Mark 1 was over 51 feet long and weighed over 5
1903 – 1995 tons The First Generation of Computers
The first electronic computer was built between 1939 and 1942 at
Iowa State University by John Atanasoff, a math and physics professor,
and Clifford Berry, a graduate student. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer
(ABC) used the binary number system of 1s and 0s that is still used in
computers today. It contained hundreds of vacuum tubes and stored
numbers for calculations by electronically burning holes in sheets of
paper. The output of calculations was displayed on an odometer type
of device.
Clifford Berry
1918 – 1963

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 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer used the binary number
system used in computers today
The patent application for the ABC was not handled properly, and it
was not until almost 50 years later that Atanasoff received full credit
for his invention. In 1990, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of
Technology for his pioneering work. A working replica of the ABC
was unveiled at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. on October 9,
1997.
In June 1943, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert began work on
the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integration and Calculator). It was
originally a secret military project which began during World War II
to calculate the trajectory of artillery shells. Built at the University of
Pennsylvania, it was not finished until 1946, after the war had ended.
John Mauchly But the great effort put into the ENIAC was not wasted. In one of its
1907 – 1980 first demonstrations, ENIAC was given a problem that would have
taken a team of mathematicians three days to solve. It solved the
problem in twenty seconds.

J. Presper Eckert
1919 – 1995

The ENIAC was originally a secret military project

Colossus
The ENIAC weighed 30 tons and occupied 1500 square feet, the
Built two years before the
ENIAC, the Colossus was a same area taken up by the average three bedroom house. It contained
special-purpose computer over 17,000 vacuum tubes, which consumed huge amounts of electric-
designed by Tommy Flowers, ity and produced a tremendous amount of heat requiring special fans
an engineer at the Post Office to cool the room.
Research Station in England.
The Colossus was designed to The ABC and the ENIAC are first generation computers because
break codes during World War they mark the beginning of the computer era. A computer is an elec-
II. Its effectiveness played a tronic machine that accepts data, processes it according to instruc-
major role in ending the war. tions, and provides the results as new data. A computer can also make
simple decisions and comparisons.

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 The Stored Program Computer
The ABC and ENIAC required wire pulling, replugging, and switch
flipping to change their instructions. A breakthrough in the architec-
tural design of first generation computers came as a result of separate
publications by Alan Turing and John von Neumann, both mathemati-
cians with the idea of the stored program.
In the late 30s and 40s, Alan Turing developed the idea of a “uni-
versal machine.” He envisioned a computer that could perform many
different tasks by simply changing a program rather than by chang-
ing electronic components. A program is a sequence of instructions
written in a code that the computer understands.
In 1945, John von Neumann presented his idea of the stored pro-
Alan Turing
gram concept. The stored program computer would store computer
1912 – 1954
instructions in a CPU (Central Processing Unit). The CPU consisted
of different elements used to control all the functions of the computer
electronically so that it would not be necessary to flip switches or pull
wires to change instructions.
Together with Mauchly and Eckert, von Neumann designed and
built the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer)
and the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer).
These computers were designed to solve many different problems by
simply entering new instructions that were stored on paper tape. The
John von Neumann
instructions were in machine language, which consists of 0s and 1s to
1903 – 1957
represent the status of a switch (0 for off and 1 for on).
The third computer to employ the stored program concept was the
UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) built by Mauchly and
Eckert. With the UNIVAC came the first computer language called C-
10, which was developed by Betty Holberton. Holberton also designed
the first computer keyboard and numeric keypad in an effort to make
the computer more user-friendly. The first UNIVAC was sold to the
U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.
Francis "Betty" These first generation computers continued to use many vacuum
Holberton tubes which made them large and expensive. They were so expensive
1917 – 2001 to purchase and run that only the largest corporations and the U.S.
government could afford them. Their ability to perform up to 1,000
calculations per second, however, made them popular.

Second Generation Computers

In 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brittain of Bell
Laboratories invented the transistor. A transistor is a semiconduc-
tor device that could replace a vacuum tube. Transistors were much
smaller than vacuum tubes, less expensive, and allowed computer to
process up to 10,000 calculations per second:

John Bardeen,
William Shockley, and
Walter Brittain

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 Transistors made computers smaller, less expensive, and
more reliable than those with vacuum tubes
In the early 1960s, IBM introduced the first medium-sized computer
named the Model 650. It was expensive, but much smaller than first
generation computers and still capable of handling the flood of paper-
work produced by many government agencies and businesses. Such
organizations provided a ready market for the 650, making it popular
in spite of its cost.
Second generation computers also saw a change in the way data was
stored. Punched cards were replaced by magnetic tape and high speed
reel-to-reel tape machines. Using magnetic tape gave computers the
ability to read (access) and write (store) data quickly and reliably.

Third Generation Computers

The use of integrated circuits (ICs) began the third generation of
computers. In 1961, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, working indepen-
Robert Noyce dently, developed the IC, also called a chip. Hundreds of transistors,
1927 – 1990 as well as other electronic components and wiring could be housed
Noyce developed the inte- within a single IC, which allowed computers to process information
grated circuit while working at a rate of millions of calculations per second.
at Fairchild Semiconductor. In
1968, he formed the company ICs are created from silicon wafers which are then etched with
that is now Intel Corporation. intricate circuits and then coated with a metallic oxide to allow the
circuits to conduct electricity. The silicon wafers are housed in special
plastic cases that have metal pins. The pins allow the ICs to be plugged
into circuit boards that have wiring printed on them.

A typical chip is about 1 cm wide by 2.5 cm long

In 1964, the IBM System 360 was one of the first computers to use
integrated circuits and was so popular with businesses that IBM had
Jack S. Kilby
difficulty keeping up with the demand. Computers had come down
1923 – 2005
in size and price to such a point that smaller organizations such as
Working for Texas Instruments, universities and hospitals could now afford them.
Kilby developed the first
integrated circuit. He used
this new technology to create
the first electronic handheld
calculator.

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 Fourth Generation of Computers
In 1970, Marcian Hoff, an engineer at Intel Corporation, invented
the microprocessor, an entire CPU on a single chip. The replacement
of several larger components by one microprocessor made possible
the fourth generation of computers.
The small microprocessor made it possible to build a computer
called a microcomputer, which was small enough to fit on a desktop.
Marcian Hoff The first of these was the Altair built in 1975. In 1976, Stephen Wozniak
1937 – and Steven Jobs designed and built the first Apple computer. The
Apple Macintosh set new standards for ease of computer use with
its graphical user interface. In 1981, IBM introduced the IBM–PC. The
computer was an instant success because of the availability of spread-
sheet, accounting, and word processor software. Desktop computers
are referred to as either PCs or Macs.
Advances in technology made personal computers inexpensive and
therefore available to many people. Because of these advances almost
anyone could own a machine that had more computing power and
Stephen Wozniak was faster and more reliable than either the ENIAC or UNIVAC. As a
1950 – comparison, if the cost of a sports car had dropped as quickly as that
of a computer, a new Porsche would now cost about one dollar.
Fifth-generation of computers are still in development and are based
on artifical intelligence.

Steve Jobs
1955 –

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