Need of Microprocessor

In the beginning, systems did not possess any intelligence. Those early days systems used vacuum tubes and hence these could carry out only few arithmetic operations. It was a difficult task to operate these machines, even difficult to maintain them and yes, it was only the food-of-the-rich!

But in course of time, the need of the day started asking us for more. Machines started developing into organized systems. In an irony, humans expected more from these systems but gave less space to these devices to inhale the pressure. These systems, hence, became more efficient and more intelligent. A small chip, now, can handle the work that 50,000 or more vacuum tubes would do in fraction of the time taken by those tubes. These chips are termed as "Microprocessor". Microprocessor is the heart of computer systems. We are learning this so that we could understand the complete mechanism and structure of the systems that we use daily like a computer, washing machine, television, etc.

A microprocessor can perform various functions depending upon the application. It is used to build a system which can perform multiple tasks by avoiding the use of traditional transistor individually and thus making the system compact in size. It is the basic building block of the third generation computers that makes them compact and versatile. These days every single piece of electronics that we embed in our surrounding has microprocessors (intelligence) in them.