Portada by Grete Pasch

From ENIAC to Pentium

For tradition sake and convenience, computer people has slowly adopted the English vocabulary for many hardware and software products. In this article we present to you a first dosage of terms and acronyms.

The first computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), was built during the second world war, and it measured 30 meters long and 3 meters high, weighed 30 tons, and contained some 18,000 vacuum tubes. Today, it is possible to place several million components in one single chip (integrated circuit) measuring one square inch, and to build computers that are super-compact and light.

The chip or microprocessor that constitutes the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the most important component of any computer. Among the new generations of microprocessors one can observe improvements in the speed of the process itself, and the amount of bits (binary digits) that can work, access and transfer at the same time. Processors are also distinctive because of their architecture. The RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) type operate from a group of simple instructions that are rapidly executed. The CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) type incorporate powerful instructions, but very complex, and have to be executed in several steps.

We usually refer to the speed of a processor in MHZ (megaherz). The prefix "mega" means one million and "hertz" (abbreviated Hz) measures the frequency of a given event. Another way for measuring the speed of a processor is by counting the amount of instructions that it can carry out in a second. ENIAC could complete 5,000 additions in one seconds. Towards 1965 there were already computers capable of processing one million instruct