4th & 5th – GENERATION COMPUTER (1975 – 1990 – Present)

Fourth Generation: Very Large Scale Integration (1975 to present) The  fourth  generation  computers  use  VLSI  chips  for  both  CPU  and  memory.  The  VLSI technology allowed millions of transistors on a single chip. This high density of fabrication directly affected the size and sped of the machine. With heavy drop in price, it was feasible for  single individual  to  have  his/her  own  computer.  Some of the achievements  in  this generations are:

• RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) was introduced.
• Superscalar computers and personal computers were introduced.
• User friendly and fast computer with virtual technology is available in the market.
• Progress in neural  network and AI has helped to produce intelligent machines that the  fifth  generation  computers  are  under  development  stage.  Highly  developed can learn, adopt and analyze the knowledge itself.
• Improvement on distributed system, and network communication system.
• Examples of fourth generation computers are: Apple Macintosh, IBM PCs etc.

Fifth Generation: (Present and Beyond)

• The fifth generation computers are under development stage. Highly developed countries such as have undertaken projects to design and develop such computers. These computers  will  use ULSI (Ultra  Large Scale Integration)  chips.
• There will  be progress  on  intelligent  system  and  expert  system  to  develop  intelligent  computers which  can  have  vision,  learning  ability,  object  recognition  and  synthesis  ability, natural language understanding ability.
• The  input  and  output  of  the  computes  will  be  in  the  form  of  speech  and  graphic