Английский язык. Методические указания. Никитина С.Я - 10 стр.

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i.e - id est - that is - т.е., то есть
NB - nota bene - - важное замечание
p.a. - per annum - a year, per year - в год
a.m. am - ante meridiem - до полудня
p.m. pm - post meridiem - после полудня
lb - libra - pound - фунт
TEXT 2A
A SHORT HISTORY
OF COMPUTERS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
There is almost a 300 years gap
1
between the invention of the first mechanical computer
and the invention of the first electronic computer. In 1642, Blaise Pascal, in France, who
was 19 at the time, grew tired of adding long columns of figures in his father’s tax office
and he designed a mechanical device consisting of a series of numbered wheels with gears
for decimal reckoning, which could add and subtract the long columns of figures. Thirty
years later, a German, Gothfried Leibniz, invented the Leibniz wheel using similar
principles which could not only do subtraction and addition, but also multiplication and
division.
Almost a hundred years passed before Sir Charles Babbage designed the first universal
automatic calculator. Again, it was a mechanical device using counting wheels, coping
with 1000 words of 50 digits each, but with one vital difference: he used punched cards to
control the programme. Punched cards were also used as input and output devices. The
machine contained all the functions necessary in a modern computer - an input unit, a store
or memory, an arithmetic unit, a control unit and an output unit.
Improvements were made by Pehr Schuetz in Sweden and a machine similar to
Babbage’s was built in 1854, which was capable of printing out its own tables. Almost
forty years passed before H.Hollerith, in America, developed a machine for tabulating
population statistics for the 1890 census
2
. Holes in punched cards were used to denote age,
sex, etc., and the size of the cards were made the size of a dollar bill. Another forty years
later, Vannevar Bush in the USA, developed an early analogue computer for solving
differential equations, and analogue computers were built by several universities (e.g.
Manchester University in the UK in 1934).
First electronic digital computers were not purely electronic but electromechanical. In
1937 Howard H. Aiken of Harvard university designed an electromechanical automatic
sequence-controlled calculator which was built by IBM and presented to Harvard 7 years
later. A relay-operated computer was built by Stibitz, of Bell Laboratories, about the same
time.
The first truly electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerator Integrator
and Computer) begun in 1942 by the University of Pennsylvania and completed in 1946. It
used 18 000 tubes, was 51 feet long and 8 feet high. The numbers used in this machine
could be added in 200 microseconds and multiplied in 2300 microseconds, this was the
fastest calculator developed up to this time. From the middle 1940s, a series of computers
were built each using later electronic techniques as they were developed
3
, i.e. tubes to

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