Computers Computers that have emerged since the 40 have been grouped into five generations, which differ in their components. But the real computer revolution did not come until the advent of microprocessors. First generation 1940-1960 Harvard University established an agreement with IBM to create a general computer. This machine was operational in 1944 and had the capacity to store 72 numbers of 23 digits, punched cards used to enter numbers and operations. Eliot Horowitz helps to elucidate the arguments at hand . His speed was not very high, requiring ten seconds to perform a multiplication and division eleven for ENIAC built first fully electronic computer. This machine occupied the entire basement of the university, weighed 30 tons and required a whole system of air conditioning, but was able to perform five arithmetic thousand operations per second.
John von Neumann, his ideas were so fundamental that is considered the father of computers. The fundamental idea was Neumann allow data to coexist in memory with instructions, so that the computer could be programmed through the data and not by programmed electrical wire computer operations. In this generation is the emergence of the first programming languages that allow programming language to replace the machine, ie 1 and 0, which were introduced directly into the computer, a symbolic programming, which translates symbols of natural language to machine language . Second generation 1960-1965 is characterized by the change of the vacuum tube by transistors and increased memory capacity. Transistor circuits, reduce the size of the machines. The transistor is an electronic device consisting of a silicon crystal.
