Introduction To Computer

Computer is an electronic device, which is used for varied applications ranging from performing complex calculations, writing simple letters, developing multimedia applications, financial accounting & banking applications, booking of Airlines/Railways tickets and scores of many other fields.

A Computer has many components like Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor, Memory, Printer and most important the Central Processing Unit which serves as the brain of the computer system on the whole.

Computers work when  Instructions  in a particular language are given to it to perform a task.

A  program comprises of many such instructions clubbed together.

Hardware refers to the Physical Components of the Computer that you can see and touch like Keyboard, Mouse, Printer, Hard disk and so on.

Software consists of Instructions, Programs, Operating Systems which are required to run the necessary pieces of hardware together. Without software, the hardware is of no use.

Computer

A computer is an electronic data processing device which can read and write, compute and compare, store and process large volume of data with high speed, accuracy and reliability. A computer has several components like Keyboard, Mouse, Processor, Memeory, Monitor etc.

The basic Organisation of a computer includes the following:

1.         Input Unit: The data is entered using an input device such as a Keyboard or a Mouse.

2.         Processing Unit: The computer processes the data according to a set of instructions called Program.

3.         Output:The computer returns the processed information in the form of output that can either be printed or displayed on the output devices like Printer or Monitor.

4.         Memory: The computer saves the data and the instructions in the memory for further retrieval.

One of the most important developments leading to the personal computer revolution was the invention of the semiconductor or transistor in 1948. This feat was accomplished by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Schockley, who were engineers working at Bell Laboratories. The transistor, nothing more than a solid-state electronic switch, replaced the much larger vacuum tube and consumed significantly less power in performing the tube's job. Thus a computer system built with transistor was much smaller and more efficient.

In 1959, engineers at Texas Instruments figured out how to put more than one transistor on the same base or substrate material and connect the transistors without wires. Thus the integrated circuit, or IC, was born. The first IC contained only six transistors, but the Intel 80386 in many of today's systems has 280,000 transistors. ICs can be built with millions of transistors on-board.

The world's first microprocessor was the Intel 4004, a 4-bit microprocessor, introduced in 1971. The successor to the 4004 chip was the 8008 8-bit microprocessor in 1972.

In 1973, some of the first microcomputer kits based on the 8008 chip were developed. These kits were little more than demonstration tools and could not do much except blink lights. In late 1973, Intel introduced the 8080 microprocessor, which was 10 times faster than the earlier 8008 chip and also could address a whopping 64KB of memory. This breakthrough was the one the personal computer was waiting for.

IBM introduced its first "personal computer" in 1975. The Model 5100 had 16KB of memory and a built-in BASIC language interpreter.