(1965-1974) first began to be used integrated circuits - the whole device and the units of tens and hundreds of transistors made using a single crystal semiconductor (what is now referred to as chips). At the same time a semiconductor memory, which throughout the day is used in personal computers as operational. During these years the production of computers becoming an industrial scale. Break into the leaders of the company IBM launched the first family of computers - a series of fully compatible with each other computers from the smallest, the size of a small box (less then still not done) to the most powerful and expensive models. The most common in those years was the family of System/360 company IBM, on the basis of which the USSR has developed a series of EU computer. In the early 60's there first minikompyutery - small, low-power computers, affordable to small firms or laboratories. Minikompyutery represents a first step towards personal computers, test samples which were released only in the mid 70's. The well-known family of minikompyuterov Digital Equipment Company PDP as a prototype for a series of Soviet machines CM. Meanwhile, the number of elements and connections between them, fit in a single chip, is constantly growing, and the 70-s integrated circuits have provided thousands of transistors. This allowed to combine in a single small detalke most of the components of a computer - that did in 1971, the company Intel, released the first microprocessor, which was intended to have just emerged desktop calculators. This invention was to make in the next decade, a revolution - the microprocessor is the heart and soul of our personal computer with you.

Unfortunately, more coherent picture of the change of generations is broken.

Usually it is considered that the period from 1975 to 1985. belongs to the fourth generation of computers. But there is another opinion - many believe that the achievements of this period is not so large as to be his equal generation. Proponents of this view is called the decade belongs to "the third-a-half" generation of computers, and only since 1985, in their opinion, should count years of actual fourth-generation, live to this day. Either way, it is clear that since the mid 70's are becoming less fundamental innovation in computer science. Progress is based on the development of what has been invented, and thought - particularly by increasing power and miniaturization of components and their computers. And, of course, the most important thing - that since the early 80's, thanks to the emergence of personal computers, computer technology has become a truly mass and the public. There is a paradoxical situation: despite the fact that personal and minikompyutery are still lagging behind in all respects from the large machines, the lion's share of the innovations the last decade - a graphical user interface, new peripheral devices, global networks - owe their emergence and development of this "frivolous" Technology. Large computers and supercomputers, of course, is not extinct and continue to grow. But now they no longer dominate the computer arena, as it was before.