CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

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 Introduction
The technological advances witnessed in the computer industry are the result of a long chain of
immense and successful efforts made by two major forces. These are the academia, represented
by university research centers, and the industry, represented by computer companies. It is,
however, fair to say that the current technological advances in the computer industry owe their
inception to university research centers. In order to appreciate the current technological advances
in the computer industry, one has to trace back through the history of computers and their
development.

The history of computer development is often referred to in terms of five distinct eras, or
"generations" of computing devices. Each generation of computer is characterized by a major
technological development that fundamentally changed the way computers operate.

The First Generation:

The first computers used vacuum tubes for circuitry, magnetic drums and magnetic cores for
memory, and were often enormous, taking up entire rooms. They were veryexpensive to operate
and in addition to using a great deal of electricity, generated a lotof heat, which was often the
cause of malfunctions.

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 Vacuum tube processing unit in a first-generation computer

The Second Generation:

Transistors replaced vacuum tubes and ushered in the second generation of computers. The
transistor was far superior to the vacuum tube, allowing computers tobecome smaller, faster,
cheaper, more energy-efficient and more reliable than their first-generation predecessors.

Transistor-based processing unit in a second-generation computer

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The Third Generation:

The third generation is characterized by the development of the integrated circuit - a complete
electrical circuit whose components (transistors, capacitors,) are put onto a small "chip" made of
silicon. Users interacted with third generation computers through keyboards and monitors and
interfaced with an operating system, which allowed the device to run many different applications
at one time.

An early chip, containing 3 transistors

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The Fourth Generation:

The fourth generation computers started with the invention of Microprocessor. The
Microprocessor contains thousands of ICs.Which makes it, more powerful andreliable, small
in size, fast processing than previous generations.

The original IBM PC

The Fifth Generation:

The Fifth Generation of artificial intelligence and robotics. Increase in speed andstorage
capacity, and Development in the field of networking.

Definition of computer organization

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Computer organization is a study of a Computer Architecture. E.g. Memory,Registers, RAM,
ROM, CPU, ALU architecture, what different parts makes a computer.

Data Representation:

Data Representation refers to the methods used internally to represent informationstored in a

computer. Computers store lots of different types of information:

 Numbers.
 Text.
 Graphics of many varieties (stills, video, animation).
 Sound.

Memory Structure in Computer:

 Memory consists of bits (0 or 1)

a single bit can represent two pieces of information
 bytes (=8 bits)

a single byte can represent 256 = 2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2 = 28

Unit Abbreviation Pronounced Approximate Actual Value

Value (bytes) (bytes)

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 Kilobyte KB Kill-uh-bite 1,000 = ,
Megabyte MB Mehg-uh-bite 1,000,000 1,048,576
1 million 1024k = . =

Gigabyte GB Gig-uh-bite 1,000,000,000 1,073,741,824

1 billion
Terabyte TB Terr-uh-bite 1,000,000,000,000 1,009,511,627,776
1 trillion

Binary Number:

Normally we write numbers using digits 0 to 9. This is called decimal numbers (base10).
However, any positive integer (whole number) can be easily represented by asequence of 0's and
1's. Numbers in this form are said to be binary numbers in (base 2).

Decimal numbers use a positional system based on powers of 10 to indicate their value. The
number 1 2 3 is really 1 hundred +2 tens + 3 ones. The value of each position is determined by
ever-higher powers of 10, read from left to right.

Base 2 works the same way, just with different powers. The number 101 in base 2 is really 1 four
+ 0 twos +1 one (which equals 5 in base 10).

Binary Representation of Numbers:

Binary Numbers are numbers represented with 0's and 1's.
They work much the same way as our normal decimal numbers except instead of 10 digits ( 0 to
9 ) there are only 2 digits ( o and 1 ).

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Decimal number (subscript indicates base 10):8401.32
= 8×1000 + 4×100 + 0×10 + 1×1 + 3×1/10 + 2×1/100
= 8×103 + 4× 102 + 0× 101 + 1× 100 + 3× 10−1 + 2× 10−2

Binary number (subscript indicates base):1101.01

= 1×8 + 1×4 + 0×2 + 1×1 + 0×1/2 + 1×1/4
= 1×23 + 1×22 + 0×21 + 1×20 + 0×2−1 + 1×2−2
Which in base 10 is 1101.01= 8 + 4 + 1 + 1/4 = 13.25

Text:
Text can represented easily by assigning a unique numeric value for each symbol used
in the text. For example, the widely used ASCII code (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange) defines 128 different symbols and assigns to each a numeric code
between 0 and 127.
In ASCII, an "A" is 65, "B" is 66, "a" is97, "b" is 98, and so forth. When you save a fileas plain
text", it is stored using ASCII.

ASCII format uses 1 byte per character 1byte gives only 256 (128 standard and non- standard)
possible characters. The code value for any character can be
Converted to base 2 so any written message made up of ASCII characters can be converted to a
string of 0ʹs and 1ʹs.

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Graphics:

Graphics that are displayed on a computer screen consist of pixels: the tiny"dots" of color that
collectively"paint " a graphic image on a computer screen.
The pixels are organized into many rows on the screen. In one common configuration, each row
is 640 pixels long, and there are 480 pixel colomn.
Another configuration (and the one used on the screens in the lab) is 800 pixels per rowwith 600
colomn, which is referred to as a "resolution of 800×600". Each pixel has two properties: its
location on the screen and its color. A pixel's color is represented by a binary code, and consists
of a certain number of bits. Ina monochrome (black and white) image, only 1 bit is needed per
pixel: 0 for black, 1 for white, for example. A 16 color image requires 4 bits per pixel. Modern
display hardware allows for 24 bits per pixel, which provides an astounding array of 16.7 million
possible colors for each pixel.

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