Key facts

  • ENIAC, developed at the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly and J.
  • UNIVAC I was released in 1951 and is a high-yield marker for the first commercial computer.
  • The second generation used transistors; the transistor was invented at Bell Labs in 1947 and made computers smaller and more reliable than vacuum-tube...
  • The third generation depended on integrated circuits, with Jack Kilby's 1958 IC work and Robert Noyce's 1959 contribution as key anchors.
  • The fourth generation begins with Intel 4004 in 1971 and marks the microprocessor shift toward personal and office computing.

Key Points at a Glance

  1. 1

    ENIAC, developed at the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, is a 1946 anchor for early general-purpose electronic digital computers.

  2. 2

    UNIVAC I was released in 1951 and is a high-yield marker for the first commercial computer.

  3. 3

    The second generation used transistors; the transistor was invented at Bell Labs in 1947 and made computers smaller and more reliable than vacuum-tube machines.

  4. 4

    The third generation depended on integrated circuits, with Jack Kilby's 1958 IC work and Robert Noyce's 1959 contribution as key anchors.

  5. 5

    The fourth generation begins with Intel 4004 in 1971 and marks the microprocessor shift toward personal and office computing.

  6. 6

    PARAM 8000 in 1991 was India's first indigenous supercomputer in the C-DAC lineage.

  7. 7

    MeghRaj, launched in 2014 and operated by NIC, is India's GI Cloud stack for government use.

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Computer fundamentals and core characteristics

At recruitment-exam level, computer fundamentals begin with one central idea: a computer handles information in binary form. A bit stores one state, and one byte is 8 bits. Larger storage units are built from these basic units: 1 KB is commonly treated as 1,024 bytes in binary-aligned practice, while decimal-oriented tables may also cite 1,000 bytes; 1 MB is close to 10^6 bytes, 1 GB is around 10^9 bytes, 1 TB is around 10^12 bytes, and 1 PB is around 10^15 bytes. This binary base explains why hexadecimal, a base-16 system using 0-9 and A-F, is useful for compressing long bit patterns in addresses.

Character representation is another direct part of fundamentals. ASCII is a 1963 milestone for character representation, while Unicode is a 1991 milestone and had reached Unicode 17.0 in 2025. For objective questions, do not treat data units, number systems and character sets as separate topics. They form the basic language through which hardware, software, storage and networking questions are framed.

Exam hook: revise bit, byte, binary, hexadecimal, ASCII and Unicode together because many MCQs test their exact relationship.

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