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The first generation computers were huge, slow, expensive, and often undependable.
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Two Americans Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC electronic computer.
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ENIAC, the prototype first-generation computers, contained about 18,000 tubes, and every tube was replaced atleast once in the first year of operation.
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The first generation computers were huge, slow, expensive, and often undependable.
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First demonstrated by At&T's Bell labratories, transitors regulate current or voltage flow and act as a switch for electronic signals.
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One transistor replaced the equivalent of 40 vacuum tubes.
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They consume a lot of power, much of which is wasted heat. They also tend to burn out quickly.
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As the computer era dawned, programmers were were forst to think in 1's and 0's to write instructions in machine language.
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Jack Kilby at Texas instrumementsand Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently developed integrated circuits.
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Two of the first computers to incorparate integrated circuits were the RCA Spetra 70 and the widely successful IBM 360.
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By the late 1950's, transitors,had replaced vacuume tubes as the processing and memory technology for most computers.
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these computers use transitors instead of instead of vacume tubes.
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Computer manufactures such as IBM developed operating systems that provided standardized routines for input,output,memory management,storage and other resouce managemnt activities.
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These computers ran programming language compliers that allowed programmers to write instructions using english-like commands rather then machine language.
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In 1965, Digital equipment corp. (DEC) introduced the DEC PDP-8, the first comercially successful minicomputer.
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Thousands of manufactoring plants,small buisnesses, and scientific laboratorieswere attracted to the speed,small size,and reasonable cost of the PDP-8.
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DEC introduced a succession of minicomputers that stole a share of the main frame market.
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The technology of fourth-generation computers appeared when Ted Hoff developed the first general-purpose microprocessor.
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Motorola released the 6800 8-bit microprocessor.
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The Altair computer made the cover of popular electronics in January 1975.
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Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple computercorporation and released the Apple I.
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Zilog introduced the Z80 microprocessor, an enchanced 8080microprocessor that was used in many early computer systems.
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IBM began marketing what is called a personal computer or PC. Based on the 8088 processor.
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Apple introduced a product called Apple Lisa.
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By putting millions of transistors onto one single chip more calculation and faster speeds could be reached by computers. Because electricity travels about a foot in a billionth of a second, the smaller the distance the greater the speed of computers.
