The First Generation of Computers

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DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERS

The first generation of computer which is from the year 1945 has been relatively large in size and very expensive due to the technology that we have back then. Goes by the name “Colossus”, it was the very first electronic computer developed. It is programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. The vacuum tubes or known as thermionic valves is used to perform calculations. It serve as purpose to solve mathematic problem faced by the British military during World War II. Colossus is used to decrypt secret message from the German messages during World War II. However, the existence of Colossus has been kept secret until decades after the war. The first generation of computer were mainly used by the military, it does not commercially available for usage by the citizen.
In 1946, the first ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) had completely built, the development start in 1943 which took the ENIAC developer team a staggering 3 to 4 years to build it. 2 people designed this computer, which is John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert from United States. Same as the Colossus, ENIAC took a great deal in space. It took up to 170 metre squared of space, which is equivalent of one large room. Thousands of vacuum tubes, diodes, relays, resistors, capacitors, and a million of soldered joints is used to program ENIAC. The ENIAC weight up to about 30 tonnes and consume a great amount of power, roughly around 150kW. It is not practical as the vacuum tubes often breaks and need to be replaced. Finding the broken vacuum tubes is not an easy job to do, thus makes it requires a longer time from hours, days and even weeks to properly program it. The ENIAC serve a purpose as a device to print firing tables fo...

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...omputer with the intention of promoting the computer science to the world. It can be easily accessible by anybody to develop a program or anything which will contribute to the development of computers.
For the fifth generation computers, which are currently being developed with the objective to develop a device that can response to a natural language input, capable of learning, and also self-organization. It can be said as a development of artificial intelligence. Even though the technology is in development, there are still some application that is widely used today such as voice recognition. The fifth generation computers will be based on Quantum Computation, molecular and nanotechnology. It will significantly change the face of computers that we will see in future. It is seen as the fifth generation computers will match the power of human intelligence.

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