History of Computing - First Four Generations
First generation: ENIAC and other vacuum tube computers (1940s - 1950s)
First generation: Vacuum tube computers (1940s - 1950s)
Second generation (1950s): Transistors
Third generation (1960s and 1970s): Integrated circuits
Fourth generation (late 1970s through present): LSI and VLSI
- Personal computers, computer networks, WWW, etc.
Next generation:
- New user interfaces (voice activation, etc.)
- New computational paradigm (parallel processing, neural network, etc.)
- Parallel processing, artificial intelligence, optical processing, visual programming, gigabit networks, etc.