The short notes on Technologies used in Computers

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Index:
First Generation Computer: ---------------------------------------- (3)
Key technology used
Major Components of Vacuum tubes
Working principle of Vacuum tubes
Second Generation Computer: ------------------------------------- (6)
Key technology used
Major Components of Transistors
Working principle of Transistors
Third Generation Computer: --------------------------------------- (7)
Key technology used
Major Components of Integrated Circuit
Working principle of Integrated Circuit
Fourth Generation Computer: -------------------------------------- (8)
Key technology used
Major Components of Microprocessor
Working principle of Microprocessor
Fifth Generation Computer: -------------------------------------- (10)
Key technology used
Some key technological aspects of fifth generation computing:
Artificial Intelligence
Biocomputers
Quantum Computing
Abbreviations: -------------------------------------------------------- (14)
References: ------------------------------------------------------------ (15)

First Generation Computer

The period of first generation was 1946-1959. The computers of first generation used vacuum
tubes as the basic components for memory and circuitry for CPU (Central Processing Unit). In
this generation, mainly batch processing operating system were used. Punched cards, paper tape,
and magnetic tape were used as input and output devices. The computers in this generation used
machine code as programming language.
Some computers of this generation were: ENIAC, EDVAC, IBM-701, IBM-650
Key technology used:
Vacuum tube: Alternatively referred to as an electron tube or valve was first developed by John
Ambrose Fleming in 1904. The vacuum tube is a glass tube that has its gas removed which
creates a vacuum. Vacuum tubes contain electrodes for controlling electron flow in early
computers that used them as a switch or an amplifier.
Vacuum tubes used as switches made electronic computing possible for the first time.
These tubes, like electric bulbs, produced a lot of heat and were prone to frequent fusing of the
installations, therefore, were very expensive and could be afforded only by very large
organizations. The cost and relatively short mean time to failure of tubes were limiting factors.

Fig: The 1946 ENIAC computer used 17,468 vacuum tubes and consumed 150 kW of power

Major Components of Vacuum tubes:

A. Cathode:
In a vacuum tube or electronic vacuum system, the cathode is a metal surface which
emits free electrons into the evacuated space.
B. Plate (anode):
In electronic vacuum devices, such as a cathode ray tube, the anode is the positively
charged electron collector. In a tube, the anode is a charged positive plate that collects the
electrons emitted by the cathode through electric attraction. It also accelerates the flow of
these electrons.
C. Control grid:
The control grid is an electrode used to control the flow of electrons from the cathode to
the anode (plate) electrode. The control grid usually consists of a cylindrical screen or
helix of fine wire surrounding the cathode, and is surrounded in turn by the anode.
D. The heater inside the cathode:
An oxide-coated cathode can't heat itself, and it has to be hot to emit electrons. So, a wire
filament heater is inserted within the cathode. This heater has to be coated with an
electrical insulation that won't burn up at the high temperatures, so it is coated with
powdered aluminum oxide.
Fig: Vacuum Tube

Working principle:
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Vacuum tubes are mostly used as amplifiers, oscillators or switches.

As an amplifier they use either the current, or the voltage of a low-level input signal to control
the current drawn from a higher-powered source, which is supplied as an output to a load.
As a switch, the amplifier has a very high gain, such that the output is either turned fully on, or
fully off. This allows the formation of logic circuits. Lots of logic circuits can be combined to
form a computer.

Fig: The IAS machine

Second Generation Computer

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The period of second generation was 1959-1965. In this generation transistors were used that
were cheaper, consumed less power, more compact in size, more reliable and faster than the firstgeneration machines made of vacuum tubes. In this generation, magnetic cores were used as
primary memory and magnetic tape and magnetic disks as secondary storage devices. In this
generation assembly language and high-level programming languages like FORTRAN, COBOL
were used. The computers used batch processing and multiprogramming operating system.
Some computers of this generation were: IBM 1620, IBM 7094, CDC 1604, CDC 3600,
UNIVAC 1108
Key technology used:
Transistor: Developed by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at the Bell
Laboratories on December 23, 1947. The transistor (short for transfer resistance) is made up
of semi-conductors and is a component used to control the amount of current or voltage or used
for amplification/modulation or switching of an electronic signal.
Major Components of Transistor:
Transistor is composed of semiconductor (mostly Silicon and its doped variations) material
usually with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage
or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current through another
pair of terminals.
Working principle:
Transistors are commonly used in digital circuits as electronic switches which can be either in an
"on" or "off" state, both for high-power applications such as switched-mode power supplies and
for low-power applications such as logic gates. Lots of logic circuits can be combined to form a
computer.

Fig: Assorted discrete transistors

Third Generation Computer

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The period of third generation was 1965-1971. The computers of third generation used integrated
circuits (IC's) in place of transistors. A single IC has many transistors, resistors and capacitors
along with the associated circuitry. The IC was invented by Jack Kilby. This development made
computers smaller in size, reliable and efficient. In this generation, remote processing, timesharing, multi-programming operating system were used. High-level languages (FORTRAN-II
TO IV, COBOL, PASCAL PL/1, BASIC, ALGOL-68 etc.) were used during this generation.
Some computers of this generation were: IBM-360 series, Honeywell-6000 series, PDP
(Personal Data Processor), IBM-370/168, TDC-316
Key technology used:
Integrated circuit: Alternatively referred to as a bare chip, monolithic integrated circuit,
or microchip, IC is short for Integrated Circuit or Integrated Chip. The IC is a package
containing many circuits, pathways, transistors, and other electronic components all working
together to perform a particular function or a series of functions.
Major Components of Integrated Circuit:
An integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small plate ("chip") of semiconductor
material, normally silicon. This can be made much smaller than a discrete circuit made from
independent electronic components. ICs can be made very compact, having up to several
billion transistors and other electronic components in an area the size of a human fingernail.
Working principle:
The integrated circuit uses a semiconductor material as the working table and frequently silicon
is selected for the task. Afterwards, electrical components such as diodes, transistors and
resistors, etc. are added to this chip in minimized form. Electrical components are joined together
in such a way that they are able to carry out multiple tasks and calculations.

Fig: Transistors

Fourth Generation Computer

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The period of fourth generation is 1971- Present. The microprocessor brought the fourth
generation of computers, as thousands of integrated circuits were built onto a single silicon chip.
Fourth generation computers became more powerful, compact, reliable, and affordable. As a
result, it gave rise to personal computer (PC) revolution. In this generation time sharing, real
time, networks, distributed operating system were used. All the high-level languages like C, C+
+, Java, .Net etc., were used in this generation.
Some computers of this generation were: IBM 4341, DEC 10, STAR 1000 and APPLE II
Key technology used:
Microprocessor: A microprocessor is a computer processor which incorporates the functions of
a computer's central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit (IC), or at most a few
integrated circuits. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock driven, register based,
programmable electronic device which accepts digital or binary data as input, processes it
according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. Microprocessors
contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic. Microprocessors operate on
numbers and symbols represented in the binary numeral system.
Working principle:
A microprocessor executes a collection of machine instructions that tell the processor what to do.
Based on the instructions, a microprocessor does three basic things:

Using its ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit), a microprocessor can perform mathematical

operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Modern
microprocessors contain complete floating point processors that can perform
extremely sophisticated operations on large floating point numbers.

A microprocessor can move data from one memory location to another.

A microprocessor can make decisions and jump to a new set of instructions based on
those decisions.

There may be very sophisticated things that a microprocessor does, but those are its three
basic activities. The following diagram shows an extremely simple microprocessor
capable of doing those three things:

This is about as simple as a microprocessor gets. This microprocessor has:

1)An address bus (that may
be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that
sends an address to memory
2)A data bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32
bits wide) that can send data to
memory or receive data from memory
3)An RD (read) and WR (write)
line to tell the memory whether it
wants to set or get the addressed
location
4)A clock line that lets a clock
pulse sequence the processor
5)A reset line that resets the
program counter to zero (or whatever) and restarts execution

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Fig: MicroprocessorsFifth

Generation Computer

The period of fifth generation is Present and beyond. Fifth generation computing devices, based
on artificial intelligence and other advancements, are still in development, though there are some
applications, such as voice recognition, that are being used today. The use of parallel
processing and superconductors is helping to make artificial intelligence a reality. Quantum
computation and molecular and nanotechnology will radically change the face of computers in
years to come. The goal of fifth-generation computing is to develop devices that respond
to natural language input and are capable of learning and self-organization.
Some key technological aspects of fifth generation computing:
1) Artificial Intelligence(AI): Artificial intelligence is the branch of computer
science concerned with making computers behave like humans. The term was coined in 1956 by
John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Artificial intelligence includes the following areas of specialization:
Games playing: Programming computers to play games against human opponents.
Expert systems: Programming computers to make decisions in real-life situations (for
example, some expert systems help doctors diagnose diseases based on symptoms).
Natural language: Programming computers to understand natural human languages.
Neural networks: Systems that simulate intelligence by attempting to reproduce the
types of physical connections that occur in animal brains.
Robotics: Programming computers to see and hear and react to other sensory stimuli.
Voice recognition: The field of computer science that deals with designing computer
systems that can recognize spoken words. Note that voice recognition implies only that
the computer can take dictation, not that it understands what is being said.
Currently, no computers exhibit full artificial intelligence (that is, are able to simulate human
behavior). The greatest advances have occurred in the field of games playing.
In May, 1997, an IBM super-computer called Deep Blue defeated world chess champion
Gary Kasparov in a chess match.
*AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, or Google DeepMind Challenge Match, was a fivegame Go match between 18-time world champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a computer
Go program developed by Google DeepMind, played in Seoul, South Korea between 9 and
15 March 2016. AlphaGo won all but the fourth game. The match has been compared with
the historic chess match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in 1997.

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Fig: Voice recognition software Siri by Apple Inc.

Fig: Development of Robotics

Fig: Basic structure of an

Artificial Neural Network
(ANN)

2) Biocomputers:
Biocomputers use
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systems of biologically derived moleculessuch as DNA and proteinsto perform

computational calculations involving storing, retrieving, and processing data. The development
of biocomputers has been made possible by the expanding new science of nanobiotechnology.
Biochemical Computers: Biochemical computers use the immense variety of feedback
loops that are characteristic of biological chemical reactions in order to achieve
computational functionality. In biochemical computers, the presence or concentration of
certain chemicals serves as the output signal.
Biomechanical Computers: Biomechanical computers are similar to biochemical
computers in that they both perform a specific operation that can be interpreted as a
functional computation based upon specific initial conditions which serve as input. They
differ, however, in what exactly serves as the output signal. In biomechanical computers,
the mechanical shape of a specific molecule or set of molecules under a set of initial
conditions serves as the output.
Bioelectronic Computers: Biocomputers can also be constructed to perform electronic
computing. Again, like both biomechanical and biochemical computers, computations are
performed by interpreting a specific output that is based upon an initial set of conditions
that serve as input. In bioelectronic computers, the measured output is the nature of
the electrical conductivity that is observed in the bioelectronic computer.

Fig: An illustration showing how an ATP-powered biological supercomputer would function.

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3) Quantum Computing: First proposed in the 1970s, quantum computing relies on quantum
physics by taking advantage of certain quantum physics properties of atoms or nuclei that allow
them to work together as quantum bits, or qubits, to be the computer's processor and memory. By
interacting with each other while being isolated from the external environment, qubits can
perform certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers.
Quantum computers make direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such
as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are
different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital
computing requires that the data are encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in
one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation is analog and uses quantum bits, which
can be in an infinite number of superposition of states.

Fig: A quantum computer

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Abbreviations:
CPU Central Processing Unit
IC Integrated Circuit
ALU Arithmetic/Logic Unit
RD Read
WR Write
AI Artificial Intelligence
ANN Artificial Neural Network
DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid
ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
EDVAC Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer
UNIVAC UNIVersal Automatic Computer
PDP Personal Data Processor
IAS Institute for Advanced Study
IBM International Business Machines Corporation
TDC Torpedo Data Computer
CDC Control Data Corporation
DEC Digital Equipment Corporation

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Reference:

https://www.google.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/
https://www.quora.com/
http://www.computerhope.com/
http://www.webopedia.com/
https://www.tutorialspoint.com
http://www.physics-and-radio-electronics.com/
http://www.chipsetc.com/
https://www.elprocus.com
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/
http://futurehumanevolution.com/

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