GENERATION of computer is designed based on the HARDWARE technology used leading to better, cheaper and powerful computers that are faster and efficient than their predecessors.Generation of Computers based on HardwareGenerationDescription1st Generation (1940 – 1956)used vacuum tubes for circuitry and magnetic drums for memoryvery expensive, large in size, slow in processing and had less storage capacityused machine level language for programming2nd Generation (1956 – 1963)transistors were used instead of vacuum tubesmaller, faster, cheaper, more energy-efficient and more reliable than the previous generationHigh-level programming languages were also being developed such as COBOL, FORTRAN3rd Generation (1964 – 1971)used Integrated Circuit(IC) consisting of the capacity of 300 transistorssmall in size, low cost, large memory and high processing speedknown as minicomputers4th Generation (1972 – 2010)used VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration)became possible to place CPU on a single chipknown as microcomputers5th Generation (2010 – to date)based on artificial intelligenceprotable, superior processing speed and network connectivitythe AIM is to develop DEVICES that will respond to natural language inputs and be capable of learning Hence, it can be concluded from the table that vacuum tubes were used by the first generation computers.