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ENIAC - Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
Created in February 1946 by American scientists John Eckert and John Mauchly
It was the first large-scale electronic digital computer.
Its processing capacity was 5,000 operations per second.
Created in the second war, its main purpose was ballistic calculations.
It had 17,468 valves , with 160 kW of power.
It was programmed through thousands of switches, each of which can be set to 1 or 0 depending on whether the switch was on or off. -
Period: to
1st Generation
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EDVAC - Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer
EDVAC was designed to use binary codes and keep programs stored in memory, respecting the architecture of John von Neumann.
It was built by the Ballistic Research Laboratory US University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC designers, J. Echkert and John Mauchly were brought together by the great mathematician John von Neumann.
Physically it had almost 6,000 vacuum tubes and 12,000 diodes, consuming the equivalent of 56 kilowatts of power. It occupied 45.5 m2 of area and weighed 7,850 kg. -
UNIVAC I - UNIVersal Automatic Computer
Designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of ENIAC for a company founded by both, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, but it was only ready after it was acquired by Remington and became the UNIVAC division.
It used 5,200 valves, weighed 13 tons and consumed 125 kW to do 1905 operations per second, with a clock speed of 2.25MHz. The complete system took up more than 35 m² of floor space. -
IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine
Inventor, Thomas Watson Jr wanted to contribute what he called a “defense calculator” to help in the war against Korea.
It used electrostatic storage, composed of 72 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1024 bits each, giving a total memory of 2048 words of 36 bits each (internal electronic memory)
The speed of 701 computers was limited by the speed of their memory; the processing units on the machines were about 10 times faster than the core memory. -
IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine
The IBM 650 computer was made publicly available in the USA by IBM in December 1954.
The dimensions of the Central Processing Unit - CPU - were 1.5 m X 0.9 m X 1.8 m and its mass was 892 kg. The dimensions of the power unit were identical, but its mass was 1,348 kg.
It had a drum memory organized in words - word - with ten signed decimal digits.
The base memory had a capacity of 2,000 words - words -, but drums could be added to a total capacity of 10,000 words. -
CDC 1604
The processor running at 208 kHz contained a 48-bit accumulator, a 48-bit mask register, a 15-bit program counter, and six 15-bit index registers.
designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation
It became one of the first commercially successful transistorized computers. -
Period: to
2nd Generation
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Honeywell 400
48-bits (+2) words, that may contain 4 decimal digits signed or unsigned or 8 alphanumeric characters
Instruction word of 48 bits: 6-bits Op code, 6-bits index, 13-bits A and B addresses, 10-bits C-address. Software incliuded:
EASY Assembler
COBOL compiler
AUTOMATH scientific language compiler
Run Monitor Performances add 111 µs, multiply 1591 µs, divide 5574 µs [performance evaluated to 6 KOps] Main memory 1 to 4 Kwords of magnetic tore access time 9.25 µs -
IBM 7094
IBM 7094 had 1.4 to 2.4 times the internal processing speed, depending upon the individual application. Achieved expanded power through high-speed processing:
A machine operating cycle of 2 microseconds
A processing unit which had major speed effects on:
Floating point operations fixed point multiply and divide operations
Index transfer instructions
Conditional transfer instructions
Compare operations
New expanded functions:double-precision floating-point operations, seven index register,... -
CDC 3600
The Control Data Corporation (CDC) 3600 computer arrived at NCAR in November 1963, but the operating system was not ready. SCD staff put together an operating system sufficient to be able to utilize the machine, and by early 1964, SCD was able to provide service on the CDC 3600. By the end of 1964, usage had grown from 50 to 300 hours per month and SCD had run approximately 19,000 jobs. -
UNIVAC 1108
The UNIVAC 1107 used for register storage.Two significant design improvements: base registers and additional hardware instructions.The two 18-bit base registers permitted dynamic relocation:a program got swapped in and out of main memory,its instruction and data could be placed anywhere each time it got reloaded.The additional hardware instruction included double precision arithmetic,double word load, store,....The processor could have up to 16 input/output channels for peripherals. -
IBM 360
It was the first family of computers to make a clear distinction between architecture and implementation, allowing IBM to launch a set of compatible projects in various price ranges. It was commercially very successful. The project is considered by many to be one of the most successful in the history of computers, influencing the design of new machines for years on end. The person responsible for the architecture of the S/360 was Gene Amdahl. -
PDP-8
Produced by Digital Equipment Corporation.Sold more than 50,000 systems, more than any computer by that date.Tthe PDP-8 had a main memory of 4096 words of 12 bits.designed by WA Clark and CE Molnar that were inspired by Seymour Cray's CDC 160 . -
Period: to
3rd Generation
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PDP-11
PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers manufactured by Digital Equipment Corp. It was a pioneer in the interconnection of all elements of the system - processor , RAM and peripherals - to a single communication bus , bidirectional, asynchronous.The PDP-11 series was one of the best-selling mini-computer series of its time and one of the first to run the Unix OS, developed at Bell Laboratories. -
Period: to
4th Generation
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ICL 2900
When ICL was formed in 1968 as a result of the merger of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) with English Electric Leo Marconi and Elliott Automation.The 2900 architecture supports a hardware-based call stack.In marketing terms, the 2900 Series was superseded by Series 39 in the mid-1980s; however, Series 39 was essentially a new set of machines implementing the 2900 Series architecture, as were subsequent ICL machines branded "Trimetra". -
CDC STAR 100
The CDC STAR-100 is a vector supercomputer that was designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation.It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications. It was also the first supercomputer to use integrated circuits and the first to be equipped with one million words of computer memory. -
IBM 4341
The 4341 featured advanced large-scale integration technology to provide new and intermediate system users with significantly improved price/performance. It was available with maximum storage of either two million or four million characters. -
Period: to
5th Generation
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Grid Compass 1101
The computer featured an Intel 8086 processor
The Compass ran its own operating system, GRiD-OS.
It weighed 5 kg.
The computer was designed by Bill Moggridge. -
DEC Rainbow 100
DEC Rainbow 100 was Ken Olson's answer to the IBM PC. The Rainbow family also included the Professional 350. None of these computers were successful due to DEC's failed distribution program and the fact that their PC's were not IBM compatible. -
Compaq Portable
It was a suitcase-sized clone of the original IBM Personal Computer, with an Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 MHz running Microsoft MS-DOS. It was hardly the first non-IBM computer to run MS-DOS, but it was the first legal IBM PC clone with a high degree of compatibility. -
Macintosh Prototype
It features the aborted 5.25-inch 'Twiggy' disk drive, and is going under the hammer at Bonhams in New York on Wednesday. The Macintosh began as a personal project of inventor Jef Raskin before the late Apple founder Steve Jobs took it over. -
Apple Lisa
It was one of the first computers to have a mouse and a graphical interface. This interface was inspired by Xerox workstations. -
Macintosh portable
The Macintosh Portable is a portable computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, It is the first battery-powered Macintosh -
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. Like its predecessors, it is not an operating system, but rather a graphical operating environment that runs on top of DOS. -
PowerBook 100 series
The low-end PowerBook 100, the more powerful PowerBook 140, and the high end PowerBook 170.The PowerBook 140 and 170 were the original PowerBook designs, while the PowerBook 100 was the result of Apple having sent the schematics of the Mac Portable to Sony, who miniaturized the components -
Windows NT
The first version of Windows NT was Windows NT 3.1 and was produced for workstations and server computers. It was intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS
NT was the first purely 32-bit version of Windows -
macOS
macOS is a series of proprietary graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since early 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. -
Windows Vista
New features of Windows Vista include an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Aero, a new search component called Windows Search, redesigned networking, audio, print and display sub-systems, and new multimedia tools such as Windows DVD Maker. -
Macbook Air
Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air during Apple's keynote address at the 2008 Macworld conference. It incorporated many of the technologies that have been associated with Apple's line of MacBook laptops, including an integrated camera and Wi-Fi features. To reduce its size, the traditional hard disk was replaced by a solid state disk, or the first mass market computer to manufacture. -
Windows 7
Windows 7's new features are advances in touch and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, DirectAccess, and kernel improvements. -
Windows 8
New features and functionality in Windows 8 include a faster startup through UEFI integration and the new "Hybrid Boot" mode. a new lock screen with a clock and notifications,[64] and the ability for enterprise users to create live USB variants of Windows -
Raspberry Pi
Early on, the Raspberry Pi project leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools and in developing countries. Later, the original model became far more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses such as robotics. It is now widely used in many areas, such as for weather monitoring, because of its low cost and high portability. -
Windows 10
Windows 10 supports universal apps, an expansion of the Metro-style first introduced in Windows 8. Universal apps can be designed to run across multiple Microsoft product families with nearly identical code—including PCs, tablets, smartphones, Xbox One, Surface Hub and Mixed Reality.
