Welcome to the computer world. Practice materials for 1st year students. Еранина Т.И - 4 стр.

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                                    UNIT I

               The first steps in the computer technology

Task 1. Read and translate the text.

                      Development of electronics

                     Electronics is a field of engineering and applied physics deal-
         ing with the design and application of electronic circuits. The operation
         of circuits depends on the flow of electrons for generation,
         transmission, reception and storage of information.
                     Today it is difficult to imagine our life without electronics. It
         surrounds us everywhere. Electronic devices are widely used in
         scientific research and industrial designing; they control the work of
         plants and power stations, calculate the trajectories of space ships and
         help the people discover new phenomena of nature. Automatization of
         production processes and studies on living organisms became possible
         due to electronics.
                     The invention of vacuum tubes at the beginning of the 20th
         century was the starting point of the rapid growth of modern
         electronics. Vacuum tubes assisted in manipulation of signals. The
         development of a large variety of tubes designed for specialized
         functions made possible the progress in radio communication
         technology before the World War II and in the creation of early
         computers during and shortly after the war.
                     The transistor invented by American scientists W.Shockly,
         J.Bardeen and W.Brattain in 1948 completely replaced the vacuum tube.
         The transistor, a small piece of a semiconductor with three electrodes,
         had great advantages over the best vacuum tubes. It provided the same
         functions as the vacuum tube but at reduced weight, cost, power
         consumption, and with high reliability. With the invention of the
         transistor all essential circuit functions could be carried out inside solid
         bodies. The aim of creating electronic circuits with entirely solid-state
         components had finally been realized. Early transistors could respond
         at a rate of a few million times a second. This was fast enough to serve
         in radio circuits, but far below the speed needed for high-speed
         computers or for microwave communication systems.
                     The progress in semiconductor technology led to the devel-
         opment of the integrated circuit (IС), which was discovered due to the
         efforts of John Kilby in 1958. There appeared a new field of science —
         integrated electronics. The essence of it is batch processing. Instead of
         making, testing and assembling descrete components on a chip one at a
         time, large groupings of these components together with their