FREE online courses on the Basics of a Computer - THIRD GENERATION COMPUTERS

 

The technology of putting more transistors on a single chip developed fast. By 1963, 8 transistors were being put on a chip. This new technology was called the Integrated Circuit (IC). Today the figure is a quarter of a million transistors. Military and Space needs fuelled the research in transistor technology.

 

At first only a few components could be integrated. This was known as small scale integration (SSI). Later it became possible to integrate up to a hundred components and was known as medium scale integration (MSI).

 

The third generation was marked by the use of Integrated Solid State circuits, improved secondary storage devices and new input output devices. All this made possible, multi processing, multiprogramming, whereby a number of data processing jobs from different sources could be run virtually at the same time on a single centrally located computer. The electronic time per operation of integrated circuits was 0.1 to 1 microsecond. Central memory access time was 0.1 to 10 microseconds.