1. Super computer – A super computer can be defined as a very strong, powerful machine though very costly but with a large primary storage.

Super computer is a very sophisticated system, because of this in the beginning its use was limited to only some of the operations like the scientific research, weather forecasting, military research etc, but now these machines are being used more commonly in business organizations etc. The use of super computers is very effective for performing functions that need very high speed and also need quick and complex computations.
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The computer hardware consists of the following –
1. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) – In general terms, the CPU is referred to as the brain of the computer as it operates and controls the various other parts of the computer system. CPU acts as the stage for carrying out various important activities like manipulating numbers, letters, symbols etc. The CPU further consists of two very vital units:-

a. The Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) – This unit of the CPU is responsible for performing the arithmetic operations as well as the logical operations.

The ALU is responsible for adding, multiplying, subtracting and dividing by understanding the nature of the numbers i.e. whether a number is positive or negative or is a whole number (a zero).
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1. First generation (1946 – 1956) – Includes those computers, which were based on the use of the vacuum tubes. Such computers were very big in size with limited values for memory and processing. The vacuum tubes were used for storage and processing of the data but these tubes generated a lot of heat and also used a great amount of power. These type of computers were used for scientific and engineering purposes, involving programming, firstly in the machine language and then in the assembly language. The main drawback of such a computer was that it had a very short life span – which further resulted in low MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of the order of an hour. For e.g. the ENIAC – had only 20 registers for storage and could only support 5,000 additions per second.
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Recently there was a news about a survey which was conducted by an IT company, to know what different types of people, belonging to different environment – think about or know about the word “Information Technology” – and quite indifferent results were obtained, some considered it as a super – computer, some considered it as a lap – top or a palm top and some were considering IT as a electronic gadgetry.

‘Information technology’ can be defined as a term, which describes technologies that help the users to perform various functions like recording, storing, processing, retrieving, etc. It is because of the IT only, that today we are having such effective and efficient information systems. Computer along with tele – communication act as the two main pillars of the information technology.
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Contemporary approaches to MIS
When an information system is being developed, much importance should be given to the structure of the organization, culture of the organization, etc. But along with these, especial attention should also be given to the technical side of MIS. The various contemporary approaches to MIS development can be summarized as

1. The Technical Approach
a) Based on the mathematical and the normative models.
b) Physical technology forms the back bone of such an approach.
c) Such an approach mainly finds much needed contributions from the disciplines like computer science, management science, operations research etc.
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