The Effect on Computing

          One of the most important and admirable creation of the 20th century scientists was the invention of computer. That’s why many say that 20th century is the century of computers. The needs of computers were at peak during the WWII. In Britain the German-code breaking project was being done by Colossus, one of the early computers. At the same time another general purpose programmable computer was being used in Harvard University which was built with help of IBM. The main aim was to break the security codes of the enemy. Keeping this in mind the ENIAC was invented in the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. It was a huge computer of 30 tonnes, was fairly fast and having many vacuum diodes and triodes in the operation. It had covered some rooms and many of its parts were mechanical. The discovery of the transistor effect gave birth to new ideas for new computers. They are popularly known as second generation computers. The efforts of Jack Kilby and Rob Noyce gave birth to the third generation computers, which used the ICs and the companies like IBM started the mainframe machines having more storage capacity and faster speed.

          After the invention of the first microprocessor 4004 in 1971 in Intel everyone in the microelectronic industries thought that microprocessors can help in the rapid growth of computers. They started many new projects in inventing new microprocessors and the forth generation of computers started. The first personal computer built was the Altair 8800 of MITS which came around 1975. At the same time Apple computer was started and the first Apple machines hit the market in 1976.

          Many companies now got ready to provide computers at the household level. Among them the front runners were IBM and Apple. In parallel to the development in the hardware the software industry was also blooming. There ware many operating systems and computer languages at the starting of 70s. The most popular languages were FORTRAN, COBOL and PASCAL etc. But the C language by Dennis Ritchie found to be very helpful in system programming. Even today C has that dominance. In the early eighties the most popular OOP technology was started with the birth of C++. Of course some object oriented features were present in some other languages like Ada, Smalltalk and FORTRAN. At the end of the nineties the new technologies like the Java helped a lot in the development of the web. Then the scenario was stolen by software companies like the Microsoft and Oracle who made the computing very popular and the computers no more remained a tool of the scientific community.

          At the same time there was a huge demand for the time limited tasks, which were nearly impossible by the general computers. So the faster computers or the supercomputers were in the mind of many scientists. Among them the front runner was Seymour Cray, who started the supercomputer industry form his Cray series. Unlike the general computers the super computers were using a large number of parallel processors and high speed logics like the ECL.