THIRD GENERATION COMPUTER

THIRD GENERATION COMPUTER (1963-1972)

The third generation brought huge gains in computational over. Innovations in this era include the used of in integrated circuits, or ICs (semiconductor devices with several transistors built in to one physical component), semiconductors memory starting to be used instead of magnetic cores, micro programming as a technique for efficiently designing complex processors, the coming of age of pipelining and other forms of parallel processing and the introductions of the operating systems and time sharing. The first ICs were based on small-scale integrations (SSI) circuits, which had around 10 devices per circuits and evolved to the use of medium-scale integrated (MSI) circuits, which had up to 100 devices per chip. Multilayered printed circuits were developed and core memory was replaced by faster, solid state memories. Computer designers began to take advantage of parallelism by using multiple functional units, overlapping CPU and I/O operations, and pipelining (internal parallelism) in both the instruction stream and the data stream. In 1964, Seymour Cray developed the CDC 6600, which was the first architecture to use functional parallelism. By using 10 separate functional units that could operate simultaneously and 32 independent memory banks; the CDC 6600 was able to attain a computation rate of 1 millions floating point operations per second.

Computer automation introduces the Alpha-16. IBM introduces the 370/135 and 370/195 main fr4ame computers. Floppy disks are introduced to load the IBM 370 microcode. Intel corporations announces the first micro processor, the Intel 4004 developed by a team handed by Marcian E.Hoff. In 1972 Hand-held calculators become popular, making the slide rule obsolete. Intel's 8008, the first 8 bit microprocessor, appears but is soon replaced by the 8080. Nolan Bushnell's Pong video game is so successful that be founds Atari. Dennis Ritchie develops C at Bell Labs, so named because its predecessor was named B. Smalltalk is developed by Xerox PARC's learning research group, based largely on the ideas of Alain Kay. Alain Colmerauer at the University of Marseille develops prolog, which popularizes key logic programming concepts. Analytic complexity theory develops the idea of NP-completeness, showing that a large class of computing problems, such as the "traveling salesman problem", may be computationally intractable. Wang, VYDEC, and lexitron all introduce world processing system. In Wimbledon, England an experimental computerized axial tomography imager finds a brain tumor in a patient.