Different Types of Computers

Different Types of Computers

By emmastone

Computers have revolutionized all types of industries. They have proved to be a boon to mankind. What are the different types of computers? To know about them, read on. A computer is one of the most brilliant inventions of mankind.

Thanks to computer technology, we have been able to achieve storage and processing of huge amounts of data. We can rest our brains by employing computer memory capacities for information storage. Owing to computers, we have been able to achieve higher processing speeds, carry out critical transactions and that too with great precision and accuracy.

Computers of the earlier times were of the size of a large room and required to consume huge amounts of electric power. However, with the advancing technology, computers have shrunk to the size of a small watch. Depending on their processing powers, size and area of use, they have been classified into various types. Here's more on the different types of computers.

✦ Analog Computers: These are almost extinct today. These are different from a digital computer because an analog computer can perform several mathematical operations simultaneously. It uses continuous variables for mathematical operations and utilizes mechanical or electrical energy.

✦ Digital Computers: They use digital circuits and are designed to operate on two states, namely bits 0 and 1. They are analogous to states ON and OFF. Data on these computers is represented as a series of 0s and 1s. Digital computers are suitable for complex computation and have higher processing speeds. They are programmable. Digital computers are either general purpose computers or special purpose ones. General purpose computers, as their name suggests, are designed for specific types of data processing while general purpose computers are meant for general use.

✦ Hybrid Computers: These computers are a combination of both digital and analog computers. In this type of computers, the digital segments perform process control by conversion of analog signals to digital ones.

✦ Desktop Computers: A desktop computer is intended to be used on a single location. The spare parts of a desktop computer are readily available at relatively lower costs. Power consumption is not as critical as that in laptops. Desktop computers are widely popular for daily use in the workplace and households.

✦ Laptops: Similar in operation to desktop computers, laptop computers are miniaturized and optimized for mobile use. Laptops run on a single battery or an external adapter that charges the computer batteries. They are enabled with an inbuilt keyboard, touch pad acting as a mouse and a liquid crystal display. Their portability and capacity to operate on battery power have proven to be of great help to mobile users.

✦ Netbooks: They fall in the category of laptops, but are inexpensive and relatively smaller in size. They had a smaller feature set and lesser capacities in comparison to regular laptops, at the time they came into the market. But with passing time, netbooks too began featuring almost everything that notebooks had. By the end of 2008, netbooks had begun to overtake notebooks in terms of market share and sales.

✦ Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs): It is a handheld computer and popularly known as a palmtop. It has a touch screen and a memory card for storage of data. PDAs can also be used as portable audio players, web browsers and smartphones. Most of them can access the Internet by means of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi communication.

✦ Minicomputers: In terms of size and processing capacity, minicomputers lie in between mainframes and microcomputers. Minicomputers are also called mid-range systems or workstations. The term began to be popularly used in the 1960s to refer to relatively smaller third generation computers. They took up the space that would be needed for a refrigerator or two and used transistor and core memory technologies. The 12-bit PDP-8 minicomputer of the Digital Equipment Corporation was the first successful minicomputer.

✦ Servers: They are computers designed to provide services to client machines in a computer network. They have larger storage capacities and powerful processors. Running on them are programs that serve client requests and allocate resources like memory and time to client machines. Usually they are very large in size, as they have large processors and many hard drives. They are designed to be fail-safe and resistant to crash.

About the Author : Electro Computer Warehouse is a Re-Marketer of Grade "A" Refurbished/Off-lease computer systems. We strive to provide our customers with the best quality products at prices not found anywhere else

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