C++ Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

A Little History

Computer technology has evolved at an amazing rate during the last few decades. Today a laptop computer can compute faster and store more information than the mainframe computers of thirty years ago. (Quite a few programmers can recall bearing offerings of decks of punched cards to be submitted to a mighty, room-filling computer system with a majestic 100KB of memory—not enough memory to run a good personal computer game today.) Computer languages have evolved, too. The changes may not be as dramatic, but they are important. Bigger, more powerful computers spawn bigger, more complex programs which, in turn, raise new problems in program management and maintenance.

In the 1970s, languages like C and Pascal helped usher in an era ...