THIRD GENERATION

THIRD GENERATION

Transistors were miniaturized and placed on silicon chips, called semiconductors, which drastically increased the speed and efficiency of computers 1964-1971: Integrated Circuits Instead of punched cards and printouts, users interacted with third generation computers through keyboards and monitors and interfaced with an operating system, which allowed the device to run many different applications at one time with a central program that monitored the memory. Computers for the first time became accessible to a mass audience because they were smaller and cheaper than their predecessors (System 360 Mainframe from IBM, PDP-8 Mini Computer from Digital Equipment Corporation) Read more...

CHARACTERISTICS

1. ICs were used
2. Small Scale Integration and Medium Scale Integration technology were implemented in CPU, I/O processors etc.
3. Smaller & better performance
4. Comparatively lesser cost
5. Faster processors
6. In the beginning magnetic core memories were used. Later they were replaced by semiconductor memories (RAM & ROM)
7. Introduced microprogramming
8. Microprogramming, parallel processing (pipelining, multiprocessor system etc), multiprogramming, multi-user system (time shared system) etc were introduced.
9. Operating system software were introduced (efficient sharing of a computer system by several user programs)
10. Cache and virtual memories were introduced (Cache memory makes the main memory appear faster than it really is. Virtual memory makes it appear larger)
11. High level languages were standardized by ANSI eg. ANSI FORTRAN, ANSI COBOL etc
12. Database management, multi-user application, online systems like closed loop process control, airline reservation, interactive query systems, automatic industrial control etc emerged during this period.