Research

This page is an on-line presentation of the physical museum exibit in the Computer Science Department at the University of Stellenbosch. The department is located on the sixth floor in the Mechanical Engineering building.

Each generation of computer is characterized by a major technological development that fundamentally changed the way computers operate, resulting in increasingly smaller, cheaper, more powerful and more efficient and reliable devices.

Since the advent of the first computer different types and sizes of computers are offering different services. Computers can be as big as occupying a large building and as small as a laptop or a microcontroller in mobile & embedded systems.

Generation in computer terminology is a change in technology a computer is/was being used. Initially, the generation term was used to distinguish between varying hardware technologies. But nowadays, generation includes both hardware and software, which together make up an entire computer system.

Evolution has fascinated me for quite a while. In the digital age, what’s even more interesting is the parallel evolution that’s going on within our machinery. Computers are our creation, and like us, they get sick. There are malevolent growths within them: viruses. As technology progresses, so do the they. This happens in the same way that biological viruses evolve along with the development of new antibiotics; the more complex the antibiotics are, the more resilient the surviving viruses are.

On a cutting-edge PC in 1990, the processor, the heart of any computer, would run at a paltry 33 megahertz. The first Pentium processor from Intel appeared in 1993, performing calculations at a then-quick clock speed of 66 MHz. The race to build faster, more capable processors continued unabated, with milestones such as 1 GHz and 3 GHz reached along the way. Today, the emphasis is on building multiple processing cores in a single chip, with Intel's second-generation Core i7 offering four cores running at 3.4 GHz.

Unlike a very simple and particular tool (hammer etc.), computers have been playing an important role in very aspect of humans’ lives. For a reason, this is the multi-functionality and tremendous use of computers. Therefore, as a complex tool, the way computers can be used by human can also vary a lot. Starting from the time ENIAC was introduced, we have been exploring the world of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

This nice infographic shows the entire history of computer interface evolution over a half century, from the early punched-card days of the 1950s, through the typed command lines of the 1960s, to the well known operating systems of the present.

Computer generations: Within modern computer systems the basic element of storage is the binary digit (or bit) which can represent a 0 or a 1. The reason for this is that it is very easy to build electronic switches where an off/on condition is used to represent a 0/1 binary value. Although a single bit can only have two states, 0 or 1, a sequence of bits can be used to represent a larger range of values. Such a sequence is called a word of storage and is usually 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 bits in length.

Developing from Carr's summary of Collingwood's insights, the collection of essays on Information Systems (IS) history presented in this and the subsequent issue of the Journal of Information Technology illustrates a range of different ways in which the mutual relations between ‘the past’ and the ‘the way in which historians view the past’ can be exemplified with regard to the field of IS.