In 1947, the transistor was invented by a small team
of scientist in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The transistor is the one of
the most important inventions of the twentieth century. It is made of
semi conductors, such as silicon, germanium. The transistor is a tiny
component and it can be handled very easily. The transistor has done
lot of things in this generation. In 1960, the second generation of
computers was developed and these could work ten times faster than
their predecessors. The reason for this extra speed was provided by
transistors and diodes instead of vacuum tubes.
The second generation saw several important developments at all levels
of computer design. The technology was used to build basic circuits
and the programming languages was used to write scientific
applications.
In the past days diodes and transistors were based on electronic
switches and they have provided a switching time of approximately 0.3
microseconds. In 1954 this technology was included in the TRADIAC
machine and it introduced the memory technology to the world. Memory
technology was based on magnetic cores and it could be accessed in
random order.
During this second generation many high level languages were introduced
, including FORTRAN(1956), ALGOL(1958), and COBOL (1959). The second
generation computers also saw the first two super computers and which
were designed for numeric processing in scientific applications.
Control Data Cooperation became the leading manufacture of super
computers. The definition of super computer is big, high-speed
machines capable of performing tens of millions of operations a
second. The Live Atomic Research Computer(LARC) and IBM 7030 have
provided the above utilities to the world. These machines also
included overlap memory operations with parallel processing.
