Its characteristics are large volume, high power consumption and poor reliability. It is slow (usually thousands to tens of thousands of times per second) and expensive, but it lays the foundation for the future development of computers.

2. The second generation: transistor digital computer (1958— 1964)

Its characteristics are smaller size, lower energy consumption, higher reliability, faster operation speed (generally 654.38+ million times per second, up to 3 million times), and its performance is better than that of 654.38+0 generation computers.

3. The third generation: integrated circuit digital computer (1964-1970)

It is characterized by faster speed (usually millions to tens of millions of times per second), significantly improved reliability, further reduced price, and products moving towards universality, serialization and standardization. The application field began to enter the field of word processing and graphic image processing.

4. The fourth generation: LSI (1970 to present)

In terms of hardware, logic elements are large-scale and very large-scale integrated circuits (LSI and VLSI). In software, database management system, network management system and object-oriented language have appeared.

Due to the development of integration technology, semiconductor chips are more integrated, each chip can accommodate tens of thousands or even millions of transistors, and the arithmetic unit and controller can be concentrated on one chip, thus a microprocessor appears, which can be assembled into a microcomputer with microprocessors and large-scale and ultra-large-scale integrated circuits.

Extended data:

With the progress of science and technology and the rapid development of various computer technologies and network technologies, the development of computers has entered a fast and brand-new era. Computers have developed from single function and large volume to complex function, small volume and networked resources.

The future of computer is full of variables, and there is no doubt that the performance will be greatly improved, but there are many ways to realize the leap of performance. However, the dramatic improvement of performance is not the only way for computer development. The development of computers should be more and more humanized, and at the same time, we should pay attention to environmental protection and so on.

Baidu encyclopedia-computer