1st Generation Computers (1940-1956)
Computing Devices: ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC, UNIVAC-1. Used vacuum tubes could perform computations in milliseconds. Big and clumsy computers. Electric failure, lots of heat, required air conditioning. Stored program concept. Machine language. Used magnetic tape, paper tape.
2nd Generation Computers (1956-1963)
Computing devices: IBM 1400, 7000 Series, Control Data 3600. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes. Smaller in size. Less heat. Lower electricity consumption, required air conditioning. Machine language, assembly language. FORTRAN, COBOL and ALGOL.
3rd Generation Computers (1964-1971)
Computing devices: IBM 360 series, ICL 1900 series, CDC 1700. The integrated circuits replaced the transistors. Computers smaller, faster and more reliable. Lower power consumption. Storage upto 100 MegaBytes. High level languages. FORTRAN IV, PASCAL and BASIC. Compiler interpreters.
4th Generation Computers (1971-Present)
Computing devices: Pentium, Power PC, AMD, Apple Macintosh. Large and very large integrated circuits. (LSI and VLSI) i.e. microscopic. Portable computers. High storage capacity (upto TeraBytes). Programming in High Level Languages. UNIX OS, C, DBase, ADA, etc. Batch processing.
5th Generation Computers (Present and Beyond)
Computing devices, AI Devices and Robotic Devices. Parallel processing. Superconductors. Programming in all High Level Languages. C++, Java, Net, PHP, etc.