A. It took the stimulus provided by the Second World War, however, together with the development at that time of the thermionic valve as a reliable and mass-produced device, to open up a new range of possibilities for electronic machines. Colossus, a British computer designed in 1943 specifically for code-breaking work, first established the practical large-scale use of thermionic valves in computers, and the American ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) built in 1945 by John Mauchly (1907-80) and John Presper Eckert (1919-95) was designed to compute ballistics tables for the US army. After the war many of these experimental machines began to be developed into commercial computers. In Manchester the first electronic stored-program machine was run in 1948, and a collaboration with the Ferranti Company resulted in a number of computers such as Pegasus (1956), Mercury (1957) and Atlas (1962).
In 1946 at the National Physical Laboratory, London, TURING, a mathematician, designed ACE (Automatic Computing Engine). In the USA, Eckert and Mauchly founded the first electronic computer business and in 1951 produced their first UNIVAC computer used to correctly predict the results of the US presidential election the following year.
B. While these were the forerunners of today's calculators, they still lacked the essential ability of the computer to perform a sequence of operations automatically. The first attempt at that was made by BABBAGE in 1834, who conceived, but never built, an 'analytical engine' capable of executing any series of arithmetic operations input via punched cards and to print the answer. Babbage's machine was to store its instructions on punched cards, and this concept was turned into reality in the 1890s by HOLLERITH, who developed the idea into a practical means of storing data that could be read by mechanical calculating machines (for the American census, in his case). Hollerith went on to found a company to market his inventions, which subsequently grew to become IBM.
Even with data storage, mechanical calculating machines were far too slow to be of much practical value, and DE FOREST'S invention of the thermionic triode in 1907 sowed the seeds for a potentially much faster type of electronic calculator. In 1943 Howard Aiken (1900-73) devised a giant, electrically driven mechanical calculator, the Harvard Mark 1, which helped demonstrate that large-scale automatic calculation was possible.
C. Computers today are used to perform a dazzlingly wide range of functions and have become indispensable to modern life. Although most of their development in their current electronic form has happened over the past 20 years, they have their origins in the mechanical calculating machines of the 17th-c.
Calculating machines, starting with abacus, are a very primitive form of computer in that they can only perform one arithmetic operation at a time, whereas computers can be programmed to perform a whole sequence of operations, using the answers from the first calculation as the input to the second and so on. This makes them infinitely more powerful than the humble calculator.
Among the first calculating machines were the 1624 'calculating clock' of Wilhelm Schickard, which could perform addition and subtraction, PASCAL'S calculator of 1642 and that of LEIBNIZ in the 1670s. In 1820 Thomas de Colmar made a practical calculator which partially mechanized all four basic arithmetic operations, and in 1875 another major advance was made with the invention by the American Frank Baldwin of the pinwheel, a gearwheel with a variable number of teeth.
These developments led in turn to perhaps the zenith of mechanical calculator technology, the 'comptometer' of Dorr Felt (1862-1930) in 1885, which was a reliable desktop calculator with the convenience of entering numbers by striking keys as on a typewriter. The comptometer became a standard office calculating machine until it was superseded by electronic devices in the 1970s.
D. The next step forward came in the early 1960s with the transistor, invented by SHOCKLEY, BARDEEN and BRATTAIN in 1947, which began to be utilized to make a new generation of compact and power-efficient machines. Even so, computer circuit boards were so large that their size and complexity limited overall speed and performance. In 1958 Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments established that a number of transistors could be manufactured on the same block of semiconductor material, and the following year Robert Noyce devised a way of interconnecting and integrating such components to form an integrated circuit, or 'microchip'. The next stage was to put most of the essential components for a complete computer on a single chip, and the resulting 'microprocessor' was announced by Intel Corporation in 1971. This led to the pocket-sized calculators of the early 1970s and to the development of the desktop personal computer in 1977.
Recent developments in computing have increasingly focused on the software. Developments such as the graphical user interface (GUI), pioneered by Apple Computer, Inc., have made computer systems useful in engineering, advanced visualization techniques that use 3D graphics. The development of high-capacity data-storage devices has opened up another role for the computer in publishing, and the current development of networks and multimedia promises yet more uses, which will combine the computer, television and telephone.
6. Read the whole story and do vocabulary work.
- Give synonyms to the following word combinations or explain them in your own words:
to become indispensable_________________________
to have one’s origins in.. _________________________
sequence of operations _________________________
the zenith of smth_________________________
to be superseded by someone/smth_________________________
forerunners of smth_________________________
to be of much practical value_________________________
it takes the stimulus to do smth_________________________
sow the seeds for smth_________________________
Practice Translation
- Translate into Russian:
1. Computers can be programmed to perform a whole sequence of operations, using the answers from the first calculation as the input to the second and so on.
2. It took the stimulus provided by the Second World War, however, together with the development at that time of the thermionic valve as a reliable and mass-produced device, to open up a new range of possibilities for electronic machines.
3. Computer circuit boards were so large that their size and complexity limited overall speed and performance.
4. A number of transistors could be manufactured on the same block of semiconductor material.
5. The development of high-capacity data-storage devices has opened up another role for the computer in publishing and education, and the current development of fast public information networks and multimedia promises yet more uses.
Activity: Explore History
1. Visit www.computerhistory.org for a tour.
Find out:
● What happened in the history of computer technology in the years 1954(Turing), 1984(cyberspace, Apple), 1994(Yahoo)
● When the first integrated circuit was created, the Pentium microprocessor was released, Norbert Wiener published "Cybernetics", the first industrial robot began work, ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange — permitted machines from different manufacturers to exchange data.
2. Have a look at the devices below and match them with names:
