Q. Illustrate about fourth generation computers?

One of the main milestones in IC technology is Very large scale integration (VLSI) where thousands of transistors can be integrated on a single chip. The major impact of VLSI was that it was possible to make a complete CPU or main memory or other related devices on a single IC chip. This showed that mass production of memory, CPU can be done at a very small cost. The VLSI-based computer architecture is occasionally termed as fourth generation computers.

Fourth generation is paired with Parallel Computer Architectures too. These computers had distributed or shared memory and specialized hardware units for floating point computation. In this period compilers as well as special languages, multiprocessing operating system and tools were created for parallel processing and distributed computing. CRAY X-MP, IBM/3090 and VAX 9000were a number of the systems developed during this era.

Fifth generation computers are also available currently. These computers majorly emphasize on Massively Parallel Processing. These computers employ high-density packaging as well as optical technologies.