Primary school education

The relevance of this topic lies in the fact that the PC is increasingly used in all areas of activity;
The technical base of the PC is constantly being improved, the software is becoming more and more powerful. Therefore, it is important to determine the criteria according to which the choice of PC model is made.
The object of study of this final qualification work are personal computers.
The subject of the research is the analysis and development of personal computers.
The purpose of this final qualifying work is to consider the prospects for the development of personal computers.
To achieve these goals, it is necessary to perform the following tasks:
- consideration of the concept of PC;
- history of PC development;
- principles of functioning, its structure and types of PC;
- analysis of the prospects for the development of the PC;
- study of the role of the PC in modern life.

1 THE ADVENTURE OF PERSONAL COMPUTERS

1.1 History of the personal computer

In the history of computer technology, there is a kind of periodization of computers by generations. It was originally based on the physical and technological principle: a machine is assigned to one or another generation depending on the physical elements used in it or the technology of their manufacture. The boundaries of generations in time are blurred, since at the same time cars of completely different levels were produced. When dates are given relating to generations, they most likely mean the period of industrial production; the design was carried out much earlier, and you can still meet very exotic devices in operation today.
At present, the physico-technological principle is not the only one in determining whether a particular computer belongs to a generation. You should also take into account the level of software, speed, and other factors.
It should be understood that the division of computers by generations is very relative. The first computers, produced before the beginning of the 50s, were "piece" products, on which the basic principles were worked out; there is no particular reason to attribute them to any generation. There is no unanimity in determining the signs of the fifth generation. In the mid-80s, it was believed that the main feature of this (future) generation is the full implementation of the principles of artificial intelligence. This task turned out to be much more difficult than it was seen at that time, and a number of specialists lower the bar for this stage (and even claim that it has already taken place). In the history of science there are analogues of this phenomenon: for example, after the successful launch of the first nuclear power plants in the mid-1950s, scientists announced that the launch of many times more powerful, cheap energy, environmentally friendly thermonuclear plants was about to happen; however, they underestimated the gigantic difficulties along the way, since there are no thermonuclear power plants to this day.
At the same time, among machines of the fourth generation, the difference is extremely large, and therefore the corresponding column is divided into two: A and B. The dates indicated in the top line correspond to the first years of the computer's production. Here we confine ourselves to a brief commentary.
The younger the generation, the clearer the classification features. Computers of the first, second and third generations today, at the end of the 90s, are museum exhibits at best. The first generation machine - dozens of racks, each the size of a large bookcase, filled with vacuum tubes, tape drives, bulky printing units, all on an area of hundreds of square meters, with special cooling systems, power supplies, constantly buzzing and vibrating (almost like in workshop of a machine-building plant). Service is hourly. Frequently failing nodes, burning out lamps, and at the same time unprecedented, magical opportunities for those who, for example, are engaged in mathematical modeling. Speed up to 1000 operations / s and memory for 1000 numbers made it possible to solve problems, which previously could not be approached.
The advent of semiconductor technology (the first transistor was created in 1948 г., and the first computer using them - in 1956 г.) dramatically changed the appearance of the computer room - a more normal temperature regime, less hum (only from external devices) and, most importantly, increased opportunities for the user. However, the direct user was almost never allowed near the machines of the first three generations - engineers, system programmers and operators conjured around them, and the user most often passed it through a narrow window or put on a rack in the next room a roll of punched tape or a deck of punched cards, on which was his program and the input data of the problem. For machines of the first and second generation, the exclusive mode of using the machine and / or the batch processing mode dominated; in the third generation, a more cost-effective and more user-friendly remote was added access - work through remote terminals in time-sharing mode.
Starting from the second generation, machines began to be divided into large, medium and small on the basis of size, cost, computing capabilities. So, small domestic machines of the second generation (“ Nairi ”, “ Razdan ”, “Mir”, etc.) with a productivity of about 104 op / s were quite accessible to every university in the late 60s, while the above-mentioned BESM- 6 had professional indicators (and cost) 2-3 orders of magnitude higher.
In the early 1970s, with the advent of integrated technologies in electronics, microelectronic devices were created containing several tens of transistors and resistors on one small (about 1 cm2 area) silicon substrate. Without soldering and other actions familiar then in radio engineering, electronic circuits were “grown” on them, performing the functions of the main logical units of a computer (flip-flops, adders, decoders, counters, etc.). This made it possible to move on to the third generation of computers . whose technical base is integrated circuits.
As we move from the first to the third generation, the possibilities of programming have changed radically. Writing programs in machine code for first-generation machines (and slightly simpler assembler) for most second-generation machines is an activity that the vast majority of modern programmers learn in college and then forget. The emergence of high-level procedural languages and translators from them was the first step towards a radical expansion of the circle of programmers. Scientists and engineers themselves began to write programs to solve their problems.
Already in the third generation, large unified series of computers appeared. For large and medium machines in the US, this is primarily the IBM 360/370 family. In the USSR, the 70s and 80s were the time for the creation of unified series: ES (single system) computers (large and medium-sized computers), SM (system of small) computers and “Electronics” (a series of micro-computers). They were based on American prototypes from IBM and DEC ( Digital Equipment corporation ). Dozens of computer models were created and released, differing in purpose and performance. Their production was practically discontinued in the early 90s, but many of them are still used in various fields of activity, including education (for example, computers DVK, BK, as well as UKNTs - analogues of minicomputers of the PDP-11 type from DEC ) .