Top 10 Supercomputers

If someone says "supercomputer," your mind may jump to Deep Blue, and you wouldn't be alone. IBM's silicon chess wizard defeated grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, cementing it as one of the most famous computers of all time (some controversy around the win helped, too). For years, Deep Blue was the public face of supercomputers, but it's hardly the only all-powerful artificial thinker on the planet. In fact, IBM took Deep Blue apart shortly after the historic win! More recently, IBM made supercomputing history with Watson, which defeated "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a special match. Brilliant as they were, neither Deep Blue or Watson would be able to match the computational muscle of the systems on the 2012 TOP500 list. TOP500 calls itself a list of "the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known to us." The supercomputers on this list are a throwback to the early computers of the 1950s -- which took up entire rooms -- except modern computers are using racks upon racks of cutting-edge hardware to produce petaflops of processing power.

Your home computer probably runs on four processor cores. Today's supercomputers use more than a million.
TOP500 relies on the Linpack benchmark, which feeds a computer a series of linear equations to measure its processing performance. The June 2012 list sees IBM's Sequoia on top of the world. Every six months, TOP500 releases a list, and a few new computers rise into the ranks of the world's fastest. Here are the current champions. Read on to see how they're putting their electronic mettle to work.

10 Most Popular Computers in History

As personal computers became affordable, must-have Internet gateways in the late 1990s, individual models took a backseat to larger brands. Dell didn't bother advertising special model names. It just advertised one major selling point: cheap. When Apple made a comeback with iMacs, and later MacBooks and MacBook Pros, you were either a Mac person or a PC person. Whether that PC was a Dell, or an HP, or an ASUS didn't make much difference.
But when the PC market was younger, smaller and much more expensive, things were different. Your PC was everything. In the late 1970s and 1980s, buying a computer was a huge investment, likely costing thousands of dollars and determining what kind of software you'd be running for the next several years. As a result, computer hobbyists picked favorites. And they stuck by them.

The wars between IBM fans, Tandy owners, Apple devotees and Commodore diehards were fiercer than any Mac versus PC argument. As a result, those early systems had an immense impact on those early home computer users, creating a generation of tech-savvy programmers. Ask any of them about their first (or favorite) computer, and they'll be able to tell you exactly what it was.
A few extremely popular breakout models sold millions of units. These are 10 of the most popular computers ever built. Your favorite may be among them.

10 Types of Computers

There are a lot of terms used to describe computers. Most of these words imply the size, expected use or capability of the computer. While the term computer can apply to virtually any device that has a microprocessor in it, most people think of a computer as a device that receives input from the user through a mouse or keyboard, processes it in some fashion and displays the result on a screen.

Do you know the different types of computers? See the next page to get started with the first computer type.