welcome back in this video we're going to discuss computers in the Modern Age we're going to start off talking about the different generations of computers the first generation of computers use something called vacuum tubes those are those devices that you see pictured on the screen and they want just use for computers things like TVs radios all that kind of stuff use vacuum tube so the first generation like eniac and univac they both use vacuum tubes the problem is they get very hot and eat up a whole bunch of power since most of you haven't seen vacuum tubes before let's watch a little video to familiarize you a brief overview of early vacuum tube computers although the vacuum tube was first invented in 1904 it was not widely used until around 1910. broadly used in radio vacuum tube usage increased dramatically during World War II as radio transmission radar and other military uses greatly increase the need for even better and more reliable tubes early radios of the 1920s through the 1950s rarely had more than a dozen vacuum tubes early television sets similarly had an average of only 10 to 15 tubes [Music] [Music] contrast this with the first digital computers that had thousands sometimes tens of thousands of vacuum tubes okay so now that you're a little bit better acquainted with vacuum tubes let's talk about the second generation these are transistors those are the ones you see up on the screen these replace vacuum tubes the big thing they're smaller and they use a lot less power so while computers can become more Compact and more efficient smaller less power is always better The Next Step are the third generation computers and those use something called the integrated circuit when we had these separate transistors each individual transistor would be wired up into the computer making it a big mess now we have transistors integrated directly into circuit boards and we have fewer components it takes to be able to build a computer because we have these boards with hundreds or thousands of transistors so while computers are more powerful because we have more transistors they use less power because they're integrated into the board so it's a big step up and that's a concept in general in computer science the more transistors you have the more powerful your device will be in 1970s in particular 1971 Intel developed the first micro processor the microprocessor essentially is an entire computer on the chip all the stuff that we need to compute is located on a single chip and that was a big difference nowadays all of our computers have microprocessors well we have one last generation that we're going to talk about and that's the fifth generation this is back like in the 1980s we're still dealing with microprocessors but now we're dealing with systems which we call vlsi very large scale integration in other words instead of having thousands of transistors integrated we're talking about millions and billions of transistors integrated on a single chip which allows us to have uh faster speeds more powerful Computing a lot of benefits come from that level of integration and that's what we're currently dealing with now so that's it for Generations now let's look at some computers which had a big impact along the way the first one is the Altair 8800 this was the first PC the first personal computer it cost about 395 dollars but this was not a computer for your average Joe it came as a kit that had to be assembled so you really need to be a computer geek or an enthusiast to be able to work on one of these things and build these things and oh by the way that's the Entire Computer there is no keyboard there's no monitor to work with this computer so again it's not for the average person however I will mention uh Bill Gates was one of the Geeks that used one of these systems and how did it work out for him the next one is a very important computer it's the Apple II it was released by Apple in 1977 and as you can see it has a monitoring keyboard and no assembly required so this is now a computer that the average person can use as a matter of fact they pushed a lot for education so schools end up using a lot of these computers but it made a big difference because again the average person now can use a computer you don't have to be the specialist to be able to assemble and use the thing it made a big difference and it became extremely popular the next one is the IBM PC and this was probably one of the most important ones after the Apple the Apple got the cart rolling but this one really made the difference because IBM was a well-established Computing company so when they released their version of a PC uh business started looking at and saying hey this must be a legit computer we need to use these things and it became widely popular it was accepted and it dominated the market for a lot of years it became so popular that in 1982 it was named man Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1982. so let's switch off of computer hardware for a second let's look at some software when we had computers how do the question is how do you interact with them well there are two main ways that we deal with on my first compute I did something called command line it's what you see up on the screen you type in commands and the system responds back to you I was kind of happy with it but the problem is you have to know what the commands are and it's kind of difficult to use for most users and we'll talk about that again later in the course the way we use computers now and the way most users like to use computers is using something called a GUI or graphical user interface and even though Apple popularized it it was actually invented by Xerox back in the 1970s and then Apple took a piece liked it and they Incorporated in their Macintosh computer and since then that's really the standard for personal computing speaking of which Apple introduced it in two of their computers one called the Lisa and the Mac both of them use a GUI they use something also called floppy drives which we no longer have but we but back in the day we used a lot in our computers the least of the lump on the top wasn't very popular one of the biggest problems was it was really expensive ten thousand dollars ten thousand dollars is a lot nowadays for a computer imagine when it was back in 1983. the apple on Mac rather was a lot less expensive and actually was better engineered so it was simpler nicer interface and this is the beginning of the GUI Revolution was the introduction of the max that's what it really took off going back to software there were some big programs that were introduced these are some of the first a program called word stall was the first word processor vizzy calc was the first electronic spreadsheet or spreadsheet and a program called pagemaker was the first desktop publishing software but making things like flyers magazines that's the main kind of Graphics this was the one that you would use for that there were some improvements made by other programs along the way here are some notable ones were perfect and improve the word processing then you have Lotus one two three which is one that was used for spreadsheets microsoft word for word processing and then again Excel after that we reached the age of the internet and that took off in the 90s and we had our first web browser back in 1993 that was Mosaic followed by Netscape Navigator in 1990 and then finally Microsoft in 1995 got into the game with their Internet Explorer so that's it for the developments in our next video we'll look at some of the people who had a big impact on computing