Computer World. Матросова Т.А. - 11 стр.

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УлГТУ | Ульяновск

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10
SUGG ES TED AC TI VI TI ES
1. Find the paragraph about the first Personal Computer. Translate it in written
form.
2. Write a summary of the text in Russian. Use the introductory patterns given
below:
в статье говорится…, обращается вним ание…, особое внимание
уделяется…, обсуждаются…, рассматриваются…, подробно
анализируются.
TEXT 4
Read the text. What keywords can you write? How does the author describe a
humanlike PC?
HOWARD H. AIKEN AND THE COMPUTER
Howard Aiken's contributions to the development of the computer – notably the
Harvard Mark II (IBM ASSC) machine, and its successor the Mark II – are often
excluded from the mainstream history of computers on two technicalities. The first is
that Mark I and Mark II were electro-mechanical rather than electronic; the second
one is that Aiken was never convinced that computer programs should be treated as
data what have come to be known as the von Neumann concept, or the stored
program.
It is not proposed to discuss here the origins and significance of the stored
program. Nor I wish to deal with the related problem of whether the machines before
the stored program were or were not «computers». This subject is complicated by the
confusion in actual names given to machines. For example, the ENIAC, which did
not incorporate a stored program, was officially named a computer: Electronic
Numeral Integrator And Computer. But the first stored-program machine to be put
into regular operation was Maurice Wiles' EDSAC: Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator. It seems to be rather senseless to deny many truly significant
innovations (by H.H. Aiken and by Eckert and Mauchly), which played an important
role in the history of computers, on the arbitrary ground that they did not incorporate
the stored-program concept.
Aiken was a visionary, a man ahead of his times. Grace Hopper and others
remember his prediction in the late 1940s, even before the vacuum tube had been
wholly replaced by the transistor, that the time would come when a machine even
more powerful than the giant machines of those days could be fitted into a space as
small as a shoe box.
Some weeks before his death Aiken had made another prediction. He pointed
out that hardware considerations alone did not give a true picture of computer costs.
As hardware has become cheaper, software has been apt to get more expensive. And
then he gave us his final prediction: «The time will come», he said, «when

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