Welcome to the computer world. Practice materials for 1st year students. Еранина Т.И - 11 стр.

                                       - 11 -

                                   UNIT 2

                          History of computers

Task 1. Read and translate the text. Choose the information in it to give a
        summary of the text.

                   The first calculating devices
                    Let us take a look at the history of computers that we know
         today. The very first calculating device used was the ten fingers of a
         man's hands. This, in fact, is why today we still count in tens and
         multiples of tens.
                    Then the abacus was invented. People went on using some
         form of abacus well into the 16th century, and it is still being used in some
         parts of the world because it can be understood without knowing how
         to read.
                    During the 17th and 18th centuries many people tried to find
         easy ways of calculating. J.Napier, a Scotsman, invented a mechanical
         way of multiplying and dividing, which is now the modern slide rule
         works. Henry Briggs used Napier's ideas to produce logarithm tables
         which all mathematicians use today.
                    Calculus, another branch of mathematics, was independently
         invented by both Sir Isaac Newton, an Englishman, and Leibniz, a
         German mathematician. The first real calculating machine appeared in
         1820 as the result of several people's experiments.
                    In 1830 Charles Babbage, a gifted English mathematician,
         proposed to build a general-purpose problem-solving machine that he
         called "the analytical engine". This machine, which Babbage showed
         at the Paris Exhibition in 1855, was an attempt to cut out the human
         being altogether, except for providing the machine with the necessary
         facts about the problem to be solved. He never finished this work, but
         many of his ideas were the basis for building today's computers.
                    By the early part of the twentieth century electromechani-
         cal machines had been developed and were used for business data
         processing. Dr. Herman Hollerith, a young statistician from the US
         Census Bureau successfully tabulated the 1890 census. Hollerith
         invented a means of coding the data by punching holes into cards. He
         built one machine to punch the holes and others to tabulate the
         collected data. Later Hollerith left the Census Bureau and established
         his own tabulating machine company. Through a series of merges the
         company eventually became the IBM Corporation.
                    Until the middle of the twentieth century machines designed
         to manipulate punched card data were widely used for business data