Milestones in Computing Hardware

About this interactive

The History of Computers lesson follows how calculating machines changed, each step building on the last. First came devices you worked by hand, then machines of turning gears and wheels. Vacuum tubes brought electrical switches, but they had to heat up to work, used a lot of electricity and were large. The transistor did the same switching job in far less space, and makes heat only as a side effect. Putting many transistors on one small chip made the integrated circuit, usually built for one specific function. The microprocessor put a whole processor on a chip, with thousands of transistors at first, then millions, and now billions, so complex that teams of people, and computers, design them. The cards describe each step without its name. Put them in order, oldest first.

What you'll learn

Put the milestones of computing hardware in order, from the abacus and mechanical calculators through vacuum tubes, the transistor and the integrated circuit to the microprocessor, by how each one calculates

Key terms

Abacus: An ancient manual counting tool dating to approximately 2400 BCE that used sliding beads to perform arithmetic calculations, considered one of the earliest computing devices.
Transistor: A microscopic electronic switch found in microprocessors that represents a binary one (on) or zero (off) using electrical voltage.
Integrated Circuit: A miniaturized electronic circuit containing transistors, resistors, and other components fabricated onto a single semiconductor chip, enabling the compact, high-speed logic that powers modern CPUs, memory modules, and nearly every digital device.
Microprocessor: A chip containing millions or billions of transistors that processes binary data by performing calculations and logical operations.
Transistor Density: The number of transistors contained within a processor or integrated circuit, a key measure of computational power that has grown from thousands in early chips to billions in modern processors.

Topics

Computer History Transistors Integrated Circuits Microprocessors Interactive Ordering

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