FOURTH GENERATION

FOURTH GENERATION

Fourth Generation Microprocessor brought the fourth generation of computers, as thousands of integrated circuits were built onto a single silicon chip 1971-Present: Microprocessors. In 1981 IBM introduced its first computer for the home user, and in 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh. Microprocessors also moved out of the realm of desktop computers and into many areas of life as more and more everyday products began to use microprocessors. As these small computers became more powerful, they could be linked together to form networks, which eventually led to the development of the Internet. Fourth generation computers also saw the development of GUIs, the mouse and handheld devices.

(Intel’s 8088,80286,80386,80486 .., Motorola’s 68000, 68030, 68040, Apple II, CRAY I/2/X/MP etc) Read more...

CHARACTERISTICS

1. Microprocessors were introduced as CPU– Complete processors and large section of main memory could be implemented in a single chip
2. Tens of thousands of transistors can be placed in a single chip (VLSI design implemented)
3. CRT screen, laser & ink jet printers, scanners etc were developed.
4. Semiconductor memory chips were used as the main memory.
5. Secondary memory was composed of hard disks – Floppy disks & magnetic tapes were used for backup memory
6. Parallelism, pipelining cache memory and virtual memory were applied in a better way
7. LAN and WANS were developed (where desktop work stations interconnected)
8. Introduced C language and Unix OS
9. Introduced Graphical User Interface
10. Less power consumption
11. High performance, lower cost and very compact
12. Much increase in the speed of operation