Q. Illustrate third Generation Computers?

The third generation has fundamental hardware technology: Integrated Circuits (ICs). To understand what are Integrated circuits let's first describe a term known as discrete components. A single self-contained transistor is termed as discrete component. The discrete components like capacitors, transistors, resistors were manufactured individually and were soldered on circuit boards, to create electronic components or computer cards. All these components/cards then were arranged to make a computer. Because a computer can comprise around 10,000 of these transistors thus entire mechanism was cumbersome. The fundamental concept of integrated circuit was to make electronic components and afterwards the whole CPU on a single integrated chip. This was made achievable by era of microelectronics (small electronics) with invention of Integrated Circuits (ICs).

In integrated circuit technology components like resistors, transistors and conductors are fabricated on a semiconductor material like silicon. So a desired circuit can be fabricated in a tiny piece of silicon. While size of these components is very small in silicon so hundreds or even thousands of transistors could be fabricated on a single wafer of silicon. These fabricated transistors are linked with a process of metalisation so creating logic circuits on chip.