ts (IC’s), semi-conductor memories instead of magnetic cores, microprogramming and eventually—pipelining, parallel processing and operating systems. Engineers were taking advantage of the new application languages and finding them to be very useful tools for programming instructions and controls. IC’s became the very popular. They were gradually introduced to the market. The first version was the small-scale integration (SSI), which had approximately 10 devices per circuit or (chip). Then came the medium-scale integration (MSI) that had a maximum of 100 devices per chip. Soon after the multi-layered printed circuit appeared. This design introduced semiconductor memories and did away with the core memories of the previous integrations. Photo-printing then became the new wave. It eliminated wiring, which allowed resistors and capacitors to be built into the circuitry by photographic means. By 1970, very large scale integrations (VLSI) were developed. VLSI’s contained hundreds of thousands of transistors on a single chip. For simple systems, the entire computer processor, main memory and I/O controls were able to fit on one chip. By the mid-1970’s, companies were introducing programmable microcomputers supplied with software packages. Engineers began using parallelism tools by using multiple functional units, overlapping operations, and pipelining. These applications were promoting astonishing accomplishments for computer computation power. In 1964, Seymour Cray announced his completion of the CDC 6600, which was the first architectural structure to use functional parallelism (http://csep.phy.ornl.gov/ov/node12.html). Seymour’s system was by far a quantum leap to the industry. Its computation rate was that of 1 million floating-point operations per second (1 MFLOP). Five years later, the CDC 7600 made its debut. This unit, also designed by Seymour Cray, processed at 10 MFLOP’s pe...
