First Generation Computers

IBM-701 (Electronic Data Processing Machine)

known as the Defense Calculator while in development,
was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer and its first
series production mainframe computer, which was
announced to the public on April 29, 1952. It was invented
and developed by Jerrier Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester
based on the IAS machine at Princeton.

The IBM 701 was the first computer in the IBM 700/7000
series, which was responsible for bringing electronic
computing to the world and for IBM's dominance in the
mainframe computer market during the 1960s and 1970s
that continues today.The series were IBM’s high-end
computers until the arrival of the IBM System/360 in 1964.

UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was

the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design
for business application produced in the United States. It
was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John
Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was
started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer
Corporation (EMCC), and was completed after the company
had been acquired by Remington Rand (which later became
part of Sperry, now Unisys). In the years before successor
models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply
known as "the UNIVAC".

The first Univac was accepted by the United States Census

Bureau on March 31, 1951, and was dedicated on June 14
that year. The fifth machine (built for the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission) was used by CBS to predict the result of the 1952 presidential election.
With a sample of a mere 5.5% of the voter turnout, it famously predicted an Eisenhower
landslide.

Second Generation Computers

The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his
team at the Control Data Corporation (CDC). The 1604 is known as one of the first commercially
 successful transistorized computers. Legend has it
that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding
CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to
Cray's former project, the ERA-UNIVAC 1103. The
first 1604 was delivered to the U.S. Navy Post
Graduate School in January 1960 for applications
supporting major Fleet Operations Control Centers
primarily for weather prediction in Hawaii, London,
and Norfolk, Virginia. By 1964, over 50 systems were
built. One of the 1604s was shipped to the Pentagon
to DASA (Defense Atomic Support Agency) and used
during the Cuban missile crises to predict possible
strikes by the Soviet Union against the United
States.

The UNIVAC 1108 was the second member of

Sperry Rand's UNIVAC 1100 series of computers,
introduced in 1964. Integrated circuits replaced the
thin film memory that the UNIVAC 1107 used for
register storage. Smaller and faster cores, compared
to the 1107, were used for main memory.

In addition to faster components, two significant

design improvements were incorporated: base
registers and additional hardware instructions. The
two 18-bit base registers (one for instruction storage
and one for data storage) permitted dynamic
relocation: as a program got swapped in and out of
main memory, its instructions and data could be
placed anywhere each time it got reloaded. The additional hardware instructions included
double precision arithmetic, double word load, store, and comparison instructions. The
processor could have up to 16 input/output channels for peripherals.
Third Generation Computers

The Honeywell 6000 Series computers were rebadged

versions of General Electric's 600-series mainframes
manufactured by Honeywell International, Inc. from 1970 to
1989. Honeywell acquired the line when it purchased GE's
computer division in 1970 and continued to develop them
under a variety of names for many years.

The high-end model was the 6080, with performance

approximately 1 MIPS. Smaller models were the 6070, 6060,
6050, 6040, and 6030. In 1973 a low-end 6025 was introduced.
The even-numbered models included an Enhanced Instruction
Set feature (EIS), which added decimal arithmetic and storage-
to-storage operations to the original word-oriented
architecture

The IBM System/370 Model 168 was announced on

August 2, 1972. Prior 370 systems had not "offered virtual
storage capability, which was to be a hallmark of the 370
line," and some said that the 168 and 158 were the first "real
370" products. By contrast, "in 1972, the System/370
Advanced Function was released and had new Address
Relocation Hardware and now supported four new operating
systems (VM/370, DOS/VS, OS/VS1, OS/VS2).

The Model 168 of 1972 was designed for high availability,

eased application development and operational flexibility,
with an emphasis on the needs of large data base and data
communications users. A single 168 could provide up to eight
megabytes of monolithic processor (main) storage.
Fourth Generation Computers

The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold

by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up"
successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest
computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system
performance of 800 MFLOPS. The principal designer was Steve
Chen.

The X-MP's main improvement over the Cray-1 was that it was a
shared-memory parallel vector processor, the first such
computer from Cray Research. It housed up to four CPUs in a
mainframe that was nearly identical in outside appearance to
the Cray-1. The X-MP CPU had a faster 9.5 nanosecond clock
cycle (105 MHz), compared to 12.5 ns for the Cray-1A. It was
built from bipolar gate-array integrated circuits containing 16
emitter-coupled logic gates each. The CPU was very similar to
the Cray-1 CPU in architecture, but had better memory bandwidth (with two read ports and
one write port to the main memory instead of only one read/write port) and improved chaining
support. Each CPU had a theoretical peak performance of 200 MFLOPS.

The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the
1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data
Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of
all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful
product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to
be the most popular minicomputer.

The PDP-11 included a number of innovative features in its

instruction set and additional general-purpose registers that
made it much easier to program than earlier models in the
PDP series. Additionally, the innovative Unibus system
allowed external devices to be easily interfaced to the
system using direct memory access, opening the system to
a wide variety of peripherals. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-
8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10
years. The ease of programming of the PDP-11 made it very popular for general-purpose
computing uses as well.

Fifth Generation Computers

A Desktop computer is a computer that fits

on or under a desk. They utilize peripheral
devices for interaction, such as a keyboard and
mouse for input, and display devices like a
monitor, projector, or television. Desktop
computers can have a horizontal or vertical
(tower) form factor, or be combined with a
monitor to create an All-in-One computer.
Unlike a laptop, which is portable, desktop
computers are generally made to stay at one
location.

A Laptop computer is a small personal

computer. They are designed to be more
portable than traditional desktop computers,
with many of the same abilities. Laptops are
able to be folded flat for transportation and
have a built-in keyboard and touchpad.