A modem is a device for connecting a computer via telephone lines to other computers. These and similar devices areperipherals.

The physical machinery of computers: processing and memory devices, and peripher­als, are together referred to ashardware (... the central processor (which can perform a huge number of calculations very quickly) and the 'peripherals' of the computer, such as keyboard, monitor, screen, disc drives and ex­ternal data links). Modem airliners use a mix of traditional instruments and computer-generated ones that appear on a VDU screen. Computers which use an electronic mouse to point at pictures on the screen are easier for the keyboard-shy. Today, because the personal computer and the laser-printer are mass produced and work using cheap electronic components, anybody can publish text of almost professional quality for a small investment.

They predict that magazine publishers will soon start worrying about the boom in the sales of desktop publishing software and optical scanners which can copy text and images into DTP documents. Anybody equipped with a computer, modem and telephone line can send and receive unlimited information around the world almost for free.

One of the banks spent millions of dollars on new computer hardware, only to find subsequently that only one software program ran on it.

To function at all, a computer needs anoperating system program. Some operating systems require users to type incommands to tell the computer what they want to do.

Many computers use agraphical interface or point-and-click interface such as Windows.Icons are symbols representing the different peripherals, programs, and files. Functions are activated by selecting a particular icon with the mouse.

Some interfaces allowplug-and-play, the possibility of connecting new hardware to the computer without having to adjust or configure the system to take the new hardware into account: the interface program recognises the hardware automatically.

The quality of the operating system determines how useful the computer is. The more effective it is, the more programs it can run at once and the more efficiently it uses the finite resources of the processor. ...Microsoft, the company that gave the world the ubiquitous Windows graphical inter­face. Windows popularised the mouse-driven point-and-click interface first seen on the Apple Macintosh.

Files and programs are arranged into icons so that the user can see at a glance what files are available and what programs are running.

PC games required users to enter complicated DOS commands to configure audio, video and graphics cards. The newly claimed 'plug and play' capability for Windows 95 stems from a new collection of Microsoft programs called DirectX that solves the memory problems of previous Windows versions.

Word list

monitor

screen

VDU =

= visual display unit

keyboard

mouse

printer

scanner

modem

peripherals

hardware

operating system

command

configure

graphical interface

point-and-click interface

icon

plug-and-play

Exercise 1

Read the text and decide whether these statements are true or false

1 Data is usually entered into a computer with a help of a screen pointing device, the so called a mouse.

2 A device used for a computer connection to other computers via telephone lines is a modem.

3 A monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, a printer, a scanner peripherals.

4 Physical, electronic, electromechanical devices that are recognized as “computers” refer to as hardware.

5 Unfortunately limited information can be received and sent with a computer, modem and telephone line.

6 A computer can’t function without an operating system program the quality of which shows the usefulness of a computer.

7 The Apple company gave the users of computers the ubiquitous Windows graphical interface.

8 Not many computers use a graphical interface or point-and-click interface such as Windows.

9 Icons are symbols of files and programs and activated with the mouse, so that the user can see what files are available and what programs are running.

10 Plug-and-play capability for Windows 95 is from Microsoft new programs to solve the memory problems of Windows versions.

Exercise 2

Please find in the text the terms defining the following:

1 a screen pointing device;

2 a device for connecting a computer via telephone lines to other computers;

3 the physical machinery of computers;

4 optical devices which can copy text into DTP documents;

5 a program a computer need to function;

6 symbols that represent the different peripherals, programs, files;

7 the possibility of connecting new hardware to the computer without having to adjust or configure the system;

8 the newly claimed capability of Windows 95 to solve the memory problems of previous Windows versions.

Exercise 3

Answer the following questions

1 What are peripherals?

2 Is only hardware necessary to make up a computer system?

3 Does software alone constitute a computer system?

4 Does a computer system imply a good mixture of parts working together?

5 Is system software usually referred to as programs?

6 How can we determine the computer is effective enough?

7 What kind of computers new capabilities do the famous computer companies suggest?

Exercise 4

Find in the text the passage, describing interface, and put it into Russian language.

Exercise 5

The word 'keyboard' has been omitted four times and the word 'keyboards' three times from this New Scientist article. Where do they go?

Qwerty Continuity

...The standard that was invented in 1372 is known worldwide as QWERTY after the first six letters of the top line of letter keys. The American naturalist Ste­phen Jay Gould relates that the characters on the QWERTY were deliberately set 10 be inconvenient, thus ensuring slower typing speeds.

The reason was simple. Typists us­ing the earliest mechanical typewriters could reach such high speeds that the keys were frequently jamming.

Subsequently, as Gould puts it, by some strange 'technological continuity law', the QWERTY survived into the age of electronic, despite the fact that the jamming problem was no longer relevant.

All recent attempts to create a mass market for more efficient, for example the Dvorak, on which typists can achieve touch typing speeds about 40 per cent faster than on QWERTY, were blocked. ...

Unit 4

Software

A set of instructions telling a computer what to do is aprogram. People whoprogramcomputers areprogrammers.What they do isprogramming.

Programs aresoftware. Programming is often referred to assoftware developmentorsoftware engineering and programmers assoftware developers orsoftware engineers.

Friedel does not think that a program running on a single PC will ever be able to reach the level of a good chess grandmaster in tournament play. Attempts to program a computer to integrate gesture with speech began back in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Architecture Machine Lab. When programmers are writing software, they can test how easy it is to use on 'models', programs which make the same mistakes as human operators.

Mr. Gates's boyhood pastime was computer programming. Today Microsoft, his com­pany, is the world's most successful supplier of computer software.

India has the software skills and thousands of software developers who are English-speaking and technically proficient.

IBM has invested billions in software development but has yet to make headway in high-growth markets for personal computer software, where Microsoft dominates .Can developers of complex systems avoid using formal specifications and proofs? The question software engineers should be asking about formal methods is not whether to use them, but how best to benefit from them as part of a complete software engineering approach.

Programmed instructions are referred to in general ascode.

Programs are usually written in a programminglanguage like Fortran or Pascal. This is thesource code, which is then translated into a form the machine can recognize:machine code.

Analgorithm is a series of logical or mathematical steps represented in a program.

Object-oriented programs consist of ready-made blocks and make line-by-line programming unnecessary.

Programs and the data they deal with are organized intofiles.

Windows 95 consists of millions more lines of program code than its predecessor, Win­dows 3.1. For the machine to be programmed in a standard engineering language like Fortran, the company had to write a piece of software called a Fortran compiler to translate the standard commands of Fortran into the binary 'machine code' that actually controls the machine's cir­cuitry. Illegal in most industrial countries, decompilation turns the strings of noughts and ones that a computer understands back into the English-language statements ('source code') made by the original programmer.

We have achieved such high speeds through very compact coding, and some algorithms.

Object-oriented programming, the latest software fashion, is more ambitious still. It al­lows 'objects', whether mathematical procedures, chunks of data or video images, to be de­fined once and then used endlessly. The full-screen colour picture came from a computer file of 100 kilobytes.

Programs for specific tasks areapplications.

Applications include:

database software allowing information to be stored, added to, sorted, and analysed. spreadsheets for calculations to be performed on numbers presented in rows and col­umns, for example in financial forecasting.

wordprocessing on awordprocessor that permits texts to be entered, checked, changed, and printed.Desktop publishing orDTP takes this one step further by allowing the production of attractive documents of near-professional quality.

Vital applications that have great commercial success arekiller applications orkiller apps.

New software that is announced, but that appears late or not at all is, informally,vapourwareor vaporware (in American English).

In the 1980s the firm's applications for its own operating system sold poorly. Lotus, WordPerfect and Borland became the leading suppliers of (respectively) spreadsheets, word-processors and database software. Wedded to his word-processing machines, Wang refused employees' pleas to launch general-purpose personal computers, as arch-rival IBM was doing.

The spread of desktop publishing means many students now work on exactly the same Quark Express software as the professionals. Most PC users who want a word processor, spreadsheet or database already have one. And there are no new 'killer apps', industry jargon for top-selling programs, on the horizon.

Microsoft has become a world leader in 'vapourware', new software announced long before it is ready for market, then delayed for months as the company eliminates bugs and changes specifications.

Word list

program

programmer

programming

software

software developer

software development

software engineer

software engineering

language

code

machine code

source code

algorithm

object-oriented

file

application

killer app =

= killer application

database

desktop publishing =

= DTP

spreadsheet

wordprocessing

wordprocessor

vapourware

Exercise 1

1 Skim the text to understand what it is about.

2 Find in the text passages, describing what software is and translate them into Russian language.

3 Find in the text and put down the key-words to speak about codes, algorithms, object-oriented programs, applications.

4 Write the summary of the text in Russian

Exercise 2

Complete the statements choosing the variant corresponding to the contents of the text:

1 Programs are:

a) software;

b) application software;

c) software engineering approach

2 Programming is:

a) instructions;

b) software development;

c) software engineering;

3 Code is:

a) machine code;

b) programmed instructions;

c) English-language statements

4 Programming language is:

a) instructions;

b) source code;

c) machine code;

Exercise 3

Choose the statements which correspond to the content of the text:

1 Software is the programs usually written to direct the computer to perform the tasks.

2 Today IBM and Microsoft are the world’s most successful suppliers of computer software.

3 IBM has invested billions in software development and has made headway in high-growth market for PC software where Microsoft dominates.

4 Object-oriented programs are the latest software product that makes line-by-line programming unnecessary.

5 Application software is provided as part of a computer product designed to meet a specific need in certain areas.

6 Algorithm is a series of logical or mathematical steps represented in a program to achieve very high speeds.

7 Programming language is called the source code which is translated into a form the machine can recognize, machine code to control the machine’s circuitry.

8 The main functions of a wordprocessor are to enter; to check; to change and print texts.

9 Vapourware is new software announced by Microsoft company, the world leader in the software market.

Exercise 4

Find these words in the text:

- killer application

- spreadsheet

- file

- vapourware

- object-oriented programs

What do they mean?

Exercise 5

Read the text once more and answer the following questions:

1 What is programming?

2 Is there a difference between software engineers and software developers?

3 What are programmed instructions referred to?

4 What do applications include? Why do computer users need them?

5 What kind of applications are called killer applications?

6 What is a code?

Exercise 6

Discuss the following with your partner

1 What is software? What is it usually referred to?

2 Why do computer users need software?

3 Why is a computer system considered to be incomplete without software?

4 What two broad categories can computer software be divided into? What is the difference between them?

Exercise 7

Complete each gap with a different key word or expression from this unit

1 The data is automatically forwarded every 24 hours to a hospital computer, which is _________________ to interpret the results and decide whether human health workers should be alerted to a possible problem.

2 Developing a snake-like robot took more than simply stringing a lot of joints together. Most robots, the ones that paint and weld cars or fit computer chips into memory boards, have six joints at most. The computer _________________s needed to control them would require massive computer power if extrapolated to 30 joints.

3 The astronomers plan to use a technique known as ______________ pro­gramming. This arranges the software in modular blocks so that it is easier to modify or upgrade.

4 Mobile information is 'dissolving space and time', he says, citing as an example a company that writes software around the clock, using ______________s in differ­ent time-zones.

5 Publishers will have to rethink their methods of enforcing copyright because of the ease of copying computer ______________s.

6 At midnight on 31 December 1999, thousands of computer systems around the world are in for a shock. Their internal calendars will click from 99 to 00, which their software will interpret as 1900. The 1999 problem is a particular threat to systems written in the 1970s for mainframe computers with the COBOL programming _______________, which recognises only two-digit dates.

Exercise 8

Complete this article from The Economist using the listed words, (a occurs three times, b once, с twice, and d seven times.)

a code

b programs

c programmers

d software

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1433