Computer World. Матросова Т.А. - 7 стр.

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6
TEXT 2
Read the text and make up a plan.
FRO M EL EC TRO MEC HA NI CA L TO EL EC TRO NI C CO MP UTERS: AI K EN
TO ENIAC
For over 30 years, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., one of the supersalesmen of the 20th
century, ran International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) with an autocratic hand.
As a result, the company that emerged as a successor to Herman Hollerith's
Tabulating Machine Company was highly successful at selling mechanical
calculators to business.
It was only natural, then, that a young Harvard associate professor of
mathematics, Howard H. Aiken, after reading Charles Babbage and Ada Byron's
notes and conceiving of a modern equivalent of Babbage's analytical engine, should
approach Watson for research funds. The cranky head of IBM, after hearing a pitch
for the commercial possibilities, thereupon gave Aiken a million dollars. As a result,
the Harvard Mark I was born.
Nothing like the Mark I had ever been built before. Eight feet high and 55 feet
long, made of streamlined steel and glass, it emitted a sound that one person said was
«like listening to a roomful of old ladies knitting away with steel needles.» Whereas
Babbage's original machine had been mechanical, the Mark I was electromechanical,
using electromagnetic relays (not vacuum tubes) in combination with mechanical
counters. Unveiled in 1944, the Mark I had enormous publicity value for IBM, but it
was never really efficient. The invention of a truly electronic computer came from
other quarters.
Who is the true inventor of the electronic computer? In 1974, a federal court
determined, as a result of patent litigation, that Dr. John V. Atanasoff was the
originator of the ideas required tо make an electronic digital computer actually work.
However, some computer historians dispute this court decision, attributing that
designation to Dr. John Mauchly. The background is as follows.
In the late 1930s, Atanasoff, a professor of physics at what is now Iowa State
University, spent time trying to build an electronic calculating device to help his
students solve complicated mathematical problems. One night, while sitting in an
Illinois roadside tavern, after having driven 189 miles to clear his thoughts, the idea
came to him for linking the computer memory and associated logic. With the help of
a graduate student, Clifford Berry, and using vacuum tubes, he built the first digital
computer that worked electronically. The computer was called the ABC, for
«Atanasoff-Berry Computer».
During the years of 1940-41, Atanasoff met with Mauchly, who was then a
professor with the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of
Pennsylvania. Mauchly had been interested in building his own computer, and there
is a good deal of dispute as to how many of Atanasoff and Berry's ideas he might
have utilized. In any case, in 1942 Mauchly and his assistant, J. Presper Eckert, were
asked by American military officials to build a machine that would rapidly calculate
trajectories for artillery and missiles. The machine they proposed, which would cut

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