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Invention, to explode, dynamite, powerful, closet, iron, bulb, fortune, phonograph, discovery, genius, to carry out, research.

the lighting or heating device of a various kind and the device;

something that someone has made, designed or created, that did not exist before;

subsidiary room in an apartment house;

outstanding abilities, talent, talent in the certain field of activity;

the first device for mechanical record and reproduction of a sound;

to do a particular piece of work;

LISTENING

Listen to the text “Inventors and their inventions” and fill in the chart.

Inventor Invention Year of invention Country
Samuel Colt      
Rudolf Diesel      
Samuel Morse      
Charles Macintosh      
Charles Rolls, Henry Royce      
Gottlieb Daimler, Charles Benz      

 

Lead-in

  1. Do you use the Internet?
  2. How often do you write e-mails?
  3. Do you know who invented the e-mail and when?

READING

I. Read the text

The man who invented e-mail

Ray Tomilson is the man who invented e-mail. Back in 1971 he was working in a team of programmers who were working on a program called SNDMSG (‘send a message’) that allowed users of the same computer to leave messages for one another – a sort of single-computer version of an e-mail system. They were working on the ARPANET, which was set up by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency to connect different research computers, and which later developed into the internet.

Ray wanted to distinguish between messages that were headed out onto the network and those that were addressed to users in the same office. He studied the keyboard for a symbol that didn’t occur naturally in people’s names and that wasn’t a digit. He chose @ symbol to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other distant hostrather than being local – and @ symbol is the only preposition on the keyboard. Before this, the purpose of the @ sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). At the time Ray says he gave it only ’30 to 40 seconds of thought’.

To test the program he sent a message to another computer. The message was something quite forgettable, and he has now forgotten what it was. Electronic mail is now known as e-mail or email. Domain names (apple.com, cambridge.org, etc.) were not used until 1984. Before that each host was only known by its IP (Internet protocol) address number.

Ray’s ideas changed the world and made a lot of others rich, but not him. ‘Innovations is sometimes rewarded’, he says modestly, ‘but not this innovation!’

Leo Jones, Making progress, Cambridge University Press

I. Find synonyms from the text to the following explanations:

to differentiate; the first part of a website’s address, which usually begins with ‘www.’ and ends with ‘com’, ‘.org’, ’uk’, or other letters that show which country the website is from.



II. True or False?

  1. The symbol @ meant the only preposition on the keyboard before Ray started to use it.
  2. It took Ray too much time to decide to use @.
  3. He has forgotten his first message.
  4. Ray’s idea made him very rich.

II. Read the article

Louis von Ahn

E-mail users hate“spam”,and the people who send spam hate Louis fon Ahn. They use programs called spambotsto steel e-mail addresses. To stop them, von Ahn developed a visual test involves recognising distortedwords, letters and numbers. Humans can pass the CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turning Test to Tell Computers and Human Apart”, but spambots cannot. Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are decoded by people every day. Then von Ahn started thinking about using the method to digitize books. Pages are scanned into computers that convert images into text. But computers cannot recognize distorted letters. That’s where humans can help, says von Ahn. The solution is to send unclear texts in the form of CAPATCHAs for people to decode. Born in Guatemala City, 30-year-old von Ahn teaches computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pensylvania.

Business Spotlight, 2/08

Try to give the explanation of the following words from the text:


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 970


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