Discuss the Factors That Determine the Criteria for Rating Secondry Storage Devices Used in the Information Technology Industry

THE TRADITIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF COMPUTERS IS QUICKLY BECOMING IRRELEVANT IN OUR FAST GROWING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AGE USING CLEAR EXAMPLES DISCUSS

Microcomputers : A microcomputer's CPU is a microprocessor. The microcomputer originated in late 1970's. The first microcomputers were built around 8-bit microprocessor chips. What do we mean by an 8-bit chip? It means that the chip can retrieve instructions/data from storage, manipulate, and process an 8-bit data at a time or we can say that the chip has a built- in 8-bit data transfer path. 8088 was a 8/16 bit chip i.e. an 8-bit path is used to move data between chip and primary storage (external path), but processing is done within the chip using a 16-bit path (internal path) at a time 8086 is a 16/16 bit chip i.e. the internal and external paths both are 16 bit wide. Both these chips can support a primary storage capacity of up to 1 Mega byte (MB).

Minicomputer : The term minicomputer originated in 1960s when it was realised that many computing tasks do not require an expensive contemporary mainframe computers but can be solved by a small, inexpensive computer. Initial minicomputers were 8 bit and 12 bit machines but by 1970's almost all minicomputers were 16 bit machines. The 16 bit minicomputers have the advantage of large instruction set and address field; and efficient storage and handling of text, in comparison to lower bit machines. Thus, 16 bit minicomputer was more powerful machine which could be used in variety of applications and could support business applications alongwith the scientific applications.

Mainframes : Mainframe computers are generally 32-bit machines or on the higher side. These are suited to big organisations, to manage high volume applications. Few of popular mainframe series are MEDHA, Sperry, DEC, IBM, HP, ICL, etc. Mainframes are also used as central host computers in distributed systems. Libraries of application programs developed for mainframe computers are much larger than...