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Since the end of the Second World War the technological advances have been happening at such speed that in no other field has it been so evident as in the data processing science.

When ENIAC, the first integrated data processor was built in the University of Illinois at the end of the forties, the circuits of the valves in vacuum occupied a room of 2.5 x 2.5 x 3 meters.

With the development of the transistor in 1956, the size of the circuits started to get smaller, as did the term of renewal of the technology. In 1970, the development of the integrated circuit on a chip of silicon, made it possible for all the circuits of ENIAC to occupy a chip the size of a fingernail. By this time the period of technological renewal was reduced from 20 years to four years and a half.

With the arrival of the microprocessor (a processor of only one chip), the rhythm of the changes was again accelerated up to such point that the operative speed and related access memory (RAM) of the processor, of 4.7 megahertz and 512 kilobytes, respectively, in the Motorola 8088 used in the first personal processors of IBM have been replaced by successive generation of microprocessors that functioning at speeds that are near the gigahertz count with a RAM of 64 megabytes and even more.

All the former contributed for a period of technological renewal to make it even smaller: actually, although at the moment it is stabilized the term is estimated in 18 months.