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The development of the computer - Mainframes, Midrange Computers, Personal Computers, Palmtops (Personal Digital Assistants).
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Contents Title Page Number Mainframes 2 Midrange Computers 3 Personal Computers 4 Palmtops (Personal Digital Assistants) 5 Glossary Information Technology Coursework Mainframes Mainframes have been around for decades. They were the first systems to power businesses. They often took up extremely large spaces, were expensive to buy and required large amount of power and effort, using water-cooling or air conditioning systems to keep them at optimum temperature. Mainframes are multi-user systems. They allow many users, from hundreds to thousands to work at the same time on different tasks. Mainframes use the CISC instruction set. This stands for Complex Instruction Set Computer. It uses 18 different instruction formats, with system instructions being of variable length, 16bits, 32bits and 48bits. The instructions run directly between memory and the registers, and internally within the registers and the memory. Originally the x86 was had 64kb of RAM which was expandable to 640kb. As there was no hard-drive, data was stored on tapes or 340kb floppy discs. The CPU supported...
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