
Students Guide to Information
Technology
earlier, these computers were very large, expensive, and
unreliable, and their performance was feeble by today's
standards. (Today's computers are about a million times faster!)
Also,
they consumed a great deal of electricity and generated a
lot of
heat,
so cooling systems had tó built in. Internal memory
was by means of magnetic drums (similar in principle to today's
magnetic disks), so memory access times were slow.
# The
second generation
were in operation in the early 1960s, the
thermionic valves being replaced by transistors (which at that
time had to be soldered together rather than incorporate ...