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Circuits are the technical fundament of PCs. Maybe you could remember one of the easiest circuit. A lamp connected to a battery. Maybe you expand it with a switch, resistor or other electrical components. In this case circuits are units of electrical wiring which perform a certain feature.
As you could imagine, they could be very complex and confusing, because they are made out of a lot of electrical parts, like transistors. For that reason, among others, IBM invented technologies to solve this problems. In 1964 the mainframe IBM/System 360 was published. In this mainframe they build in these new technologies. The main idea is very easy: get a lot of parts on a small board, like ceramic. Important for economy was also, that they could produce that boards in series. In this way they could stick this boards parallel in a mainframe. On the next pages you will see, which technologies had lead to today's ICs and computer architecture.
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