How have computers change over time?

Answer 1

Computers evolve drastically fast. Every year there is much new technology that arises and makes the older technology phase out quickly.

Computers have gotten more technically powerful, smaller, and cheaper over time, and have become integrated with most other forms of modern technology, notably communications and control of equipment and other devices.

Answer 2

The main ways computers have changed over time are:

1. reduced in size
2. reduced in weight
3. increased in reliability
4. reduced in power consumed and heat generated
5. increased in processing speed
6. increased in memory and bulk storage capacity
7. etc.

Many other changes of less significance than these have also happened. Some examples are:

• elimination of large panels of lights and/or CRT displays and/or electric typewriters showing the operator the machine state; these make the machine larger and tell ordinary users nothing meaningful
• transition of operating systems from batch processing to interactive command line processing to interactive graphical processing
• development of interrupt mechanisms allowing the computer to react to external events and exception mechanisms allowing the computer to detect and react to internal errors and special events without programmers having to explicitly code in checks for them throughout the program
• development of multitasking and multiprocessing operating systems
• development of memory protection mechanisms and virtual memory systems, allowing each program that the operating system has running to act as if it was the only program running on the computer and removing the risk of a defective program crashing other programs or the operating system itself
• etc.