Computer World. Матросова Т.А. - 4 стр.

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3
UNI T 1
HISTOR Y
TEXT 1
Read the text and decide on a suitable title for it.
In 1952, a major computing company took a decision to get out of the business
of making mainframe computers. They believed that there was only a market for four
mainframes in the whole world. That company was IBM. The following year they
reversed their decision.
In 1980, IBM decided that there was a market for 250,000 PCs, so they set up a
special team to develop the first IBM PC. It went on sale in 1981 and set a world-
wide standard for IBM-compatibility which, over the next ten years, was only
seriously challenged by one other company, Apple Computers. Since then, over
seventy million PCs made by IBM and other manufacturers have been sold. Over this
period, PCs have become commodity items. Since IBM made the design non-
proprietary, anyone can make them.
The history of the multi-billion dollar PC industry has been one of mistakes.
Xerox Corporation funded the initial research on personal computers in their Palo
Alto laboratory in California. However, the company failed to capitalize on this work,
and the ideas that they put together went into the operating system developed for
Apple's computers. This was a graphical interface: us ing a mouse, the user clicks on
icons which represent the function to be performed.
The first IBM PC was developed using existing available electrical components.
With IBM's badge on the box it became the standard machine for large corporations
to purchase. When IBM were looking for an operating system, they went initially to
Digital Research, who were market leaders in command-based operating systems
(these are operating systems in which the users type in commands to perform a
function). When the collaboration between IBM and Digital Research failed, IBM
turned to Bill Gates, then 25 years old, to write their operating system.
Bill Gates founded Microsoft on the basis of the development of MS/DOS, the
initial operating system for the IBM PC. Digital Research have continued to develop
their operating system, DR/DOS, and it is considered by many people to be a better
product than Microsoft's. However, without an endorsement from IBM, it has become
a minor player in the market. Novell, the leaders in PC networking, now own Digital
Research, sо things may change.
The original IBM PC had a minimum of 16K of memory, but this could be
upgraded to 512K if necessary, and ran with a processor speed of 4.77MHz. Ten
years later, in 1991, IBM were making PCs with 16Mb of memory, expandable to
64Mb, running with a processor speed of 33MHz. The cost of buying the hardware
has come down considerably as the machine's have become commodity items. Large
companies are considering running major applications on PCs, something which, ten

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