Electronic era (1946-1957)

The electronic age is what we currently live in. It can be defined as the time between 1940 and maybe right now. The ENIAC was the first high-speed, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. This computer was designed to be used by the U.S. Army for artillery firing tables. This machine was even bigger than the Mark 1 taking up 680 square feet and weighing 30 tons. It mainly used vacuum tubes to do its calculations.
Also, the integrated circuit was invented, it had faster operating speed and was invented by Jack Kilby.

There are 4 main sections of digital computing. The first was the era of vacuum tubes and punch cards like the ENIAC and Mark 1.The second generation replaced vacuum tubes with transistors, punch cards were replaced with magnetic tape, and rotating magnetic drums were replaced by magnetic cores for internal storage. Also during this time high-level programming languages were created such as FORTRAN and COBOL. The third generation replaced transistors with integrated circuits, magnetic tape was used throughout all computers, and magnetic core turned into metal oxide semiconductors. An actual operating system showed up around this time along with the advanced programming language BASIC. The fourth and latest generation brought in CPUs (central processing units) which contained memory, logic, and control circuits all on a single chip. The personal comptuer was developed (Apple II). The graphical user interface (GUI) was developed.