Компьютерная техника. Еремина Н.В. - 37 стр.

manufacturers will gave away hardware in order to sell software". Time alone will
tell whether or not this was his final look ahead into the future.
       In the early 1960s, when computers were hulking mainframes that took up
entire rooms engineers were already toying with the then - extravagant notion of
building a computer intended for the sole use of one person. By the early 1970s
researches at Xerox's Polo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) had realized that the
pace of improvement in the technology of semiconductors - the chips of silicon that
are the budding blocks of present-day electronics - meant that sooner or later the PC
would be extravagant no longer They foresaw that computing power would someday
be so cheap that engineers would be able to afford to devote a great deal of it simply
to making non-technical people more comfortable with these new information -
handling tools in their labs, they developed or refined much of what constitutes PCs
today, from "mouse pointing devices to software "windows"
       Although the work at Xerox PARC was crucial it was not the spark that took
PCs out of the hands of experts and into the popular imagination That happened
inauspiciously in January 1975 when the magazine Popular Electronics put a new kit
for hobbyists, called the Altair, on its cover for the first time anybody with $400 and
a soldering iron could buy and assemble his own computer The Altair inspired Steve
Wosniak and Steve Jobs to build the first Apple computer, and a young college
dropout named Bill Gates to write software for it Meanwhile the person who deserves
the credit for inventing the Altair an engineer named Ed Roberts, left the industry he
had spawned to go to medical school Now he is a doctor in small town in central
Georgia
       To this day researchers at Xerox and elsewhere pooh-pooh the Altair as too
primitive to have made use of the technology they felt was needed to bring PCs to the
masses In a sense they are right The Altair incorporated one of the first single-chip
microprocessor - a semiconductor chip, that contained all the basic circuits needed to
do calculations - called the Intel 8080 Although the 8080 was advanced for its time, it
was far too slow to support the mouse, windows and elaborate software Xerox had
developed Indeed, it wasn't until 1984, when Apple Computer's Macintosh burst onto
the scene, that PCs were powerful enough to fulfill the original vision of researchers
"The kind of computing that people are trying to do today is just what we made at
PARC in the early 1970s" says Alan Kay, a former Xerox researcher who jumped to
Apple in the early 1980s.
       Researchers today are proceeding in the same spirit that motivated Kay and his
Xerox PARC colleagues in the 1970s to make information more accessible to
ordinary people But a look into today's research labs reveals very little that resembles
what we think of now as a PC For one thing, researchers seem eager to abandon the
keyboard and monitor that are the PC's trademarks Instead they are trying to devise
PCs with interpretive powers that are more humanlike - PCs that can hear you and see
you, can tell when you're in a bad mood and know to ask questions when they don't