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6 According to the text one of the decisive factors that made computers so
widespread was that
A computers could do the work of accountant. B the price for PC was low.
C the worldwide net became a reality. D Bill Gates established Microsoft.
7 In 1944 John von Neumann
A met one of his colleagues at a railway station.
B designed the Adam computer.
C moved to Manhattan.
D organized the team of scientists named ENIAC.
THE COMPUTER
As the century comes to a close, the technology that obsesses us,
captivates us, and dominates us is the computer. Do you really think that we're
already into the computer age? That's a gross underestimation of what the
computer will eventually do to change our world, our lives and perhaps the nature
of reality itself.
Underestimation, as it turns out, has been a constant in the
brief but dazzling history of this amazing machine.
Surprisingly, the tale begins in the 19th century, when
Charles Babbage, an English mathematician born in 1791,
launched a lifelong quest to build the first information-
processing calculator called the Difference Engine and then
to elaborate a more programmable device dubbed the
Analytical Engine. He lacked - among other things -
electricity, transistors, keyboards and Bill Gates. Yet in the
1830s he came astonishingly close to producing something
very much like the computers that would be celebrated
decades after he died. Unfortunately, his skill at innovation was not matched by
an ability to generate venture capital, and his plans were tossed into the
unforgiving core dump of history.
The idea of a programmable machine that performed humanity's mental
labours breakthrough came at the hands of another eccentric English
mathematician, A. Turing, who outlined how it was possible to build something
that could perform virtually any mathematical task that one could describe. His
proof involved an ingenious imaginary device that would be known as the
Universal Turing Machine - essentially, a machine that could duplicate the work of
any other machine. Even if the "machine" were a human calculator.
But it took a war to bring about the physical devices that would be known
as the first real computers. In America, a Hungarian genius named John von
Neumann - perhaps the premier mathematician of this century - was pondering
mechanical devices to help perform the calculations required for the Manhattan
Project. A chance meeting at a train platform in 1944 led him to a team of
scientists working at the University of Pennsylvania to create ENIAC (Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer), which many people consider the true Adam
of computers. Designed by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly to help crunch
numbers for artillery-target estimates, this device used 18,000 vacuum tubes and
cost $400,000. Von Neumann was fascinated, and he worked with the ENIAC
Charles Babbage
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