Explain the major innovations made from the establishment of Abocus to the present 5 computer generation?
Answers
The first modern computers
The World War II years were a crucial period in the history of computing, when powerful gargantuan computers began to appear. Just before the outbreak of the war, in 1938, German engineer Konrad Zuse (1910–1995) constructed his Z1, the world's first programmable binary computer, in his parents' living room.
The first large-scale digital computer of this kind appeared in 1944 at Harvard University, built by mathematician Howard Aiken (1900–1973). Sponsored by IBM, it was variously known as the Harvard Mark I or the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). A giant of a machine, stretching 15m (50ft) in length, it was like a huge mechanical calculator built into a wall. It must have sounded impressive, because it stored and processed numbers using "clickety-clack" electromagnetic relays (electrically operated magnets that automatically switched lines in telephone exchanges)—no fewer than 3304 of them. Impressive they may have been, but relays suffered from several problems: they were large (that's why the Harvard Mark I had to be so big); they needed quite hefty pulses of power to make them switch; and they were slow (it took time for a relay to flip from "off" to "on" or from 0 to 1).
The microelectronic revolution
Vacuum tubes were a considerable advance on relay switches, but machines like the ENIAC were notoriously unreliable. The ENIAC's designers had boasted that its calculating speed was "at least 500 times as great as that of any other existing computing machine." But developing computers that were an order of magnitude more powerful still would have needed hundreds of thousands or even millions of vacuum tubes—which would have been far too costly, unwieldy, and unreliable. So a new technology was urgently required.
Personal computers
By 1974, Intel had launched a popular microprocessor known as the 8080 and computer hobbyists were soon building home computers around it. The first was the MITS Altair 8800, built by Ed Roberts. With its front panel covered in red LED lights and toggle switches, it was a far cry from modern PCs and laptops. Even so, it sold by the thousand and earned Roberts a fortune. The Altair inspired a Californian electronics wizard name Steve Wozniak (1950–) to develop a computer of his own. "Woz" is often described as the hacker's "hacker"—a technically brilliant and highly creative engineer who pushed the boundaries of computing largely for his own amusement. In the mid-1970s, he was working at the Hewlett-Packard computer company in California, and spending his free time tinkering away as a member of the Homebrew Computer Club in the Bay Area.
The user revolution
Unlike most microcomputers launched in the 1970s, which were programmed by typing in text commands, the Alto had a desktop-like screen with little picture icons that could be moved around with a mouse: it was the very first graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced "gooey")—an idea conceived by Alan Kay (1940–) and now used in virtually every modern computer. The Alto borrowed some of its ideas, including the mouse, from 1960s computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013).
rom nets to the Internet
Standardized PCs running standardized software brought a big benefit for businesses: computers could be linked together into networks to share information. At Xerox PARC in 1973, electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe (1946–) developed a new way of linking computers "through the ether" (empty space) that he called Ethernet. A few years later, Metcalfe left Xerox to form his own company, 3Com, to help companies realize "Metcalfe's Law": computers become useful the more closely connected they are to other people's computers. As more and more companies explored the power of local area networks (LANs), so, as the 1980s progressed, it became clear that there were great benefits to be gained by connecting computers over even greater distances—into so-called wide area networks (WANs).