My speciality. Шепелева М.А - 34 стр.

      4 Section IV

      4.1 Text 1

      4.1.1 Read the text and translate it: Development of the Computer

                                  Tables of Contents:

1.The First Generation: Vacuum Tubes BVMC

2.The Second Generation: Transistor

3.The Third Generation: Integrated Circuits

The First Generation: Vacuum Tubes BVMC

        AC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), designed by and
constructed under the supervision of John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert at the
University of Pennsylvania„was the world's first general-purpose electronic digital
computer.
       The project was a response to U.S. wartime needs. The Army's Ballistics
Research Laboratory (BRL), an agency responsible for developing range and
trajectory tables for new weapons, was having difficulty supplying these tables
accurately and within a reasonable time frame. Without these firing tables, the new
weapons and artillery were useless to gunners. The BRL employed more than 200
people, mostly women, who, using desktop calculators, solved the necessary
ballistics equations. Preparation of the tables for a single weapon would take one
person many hours, even days.
Mauchly, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania,
and Eckert, one of his graduate students, proposed to build a general-purpose
computer using vacuum tubes to be used for the BRL's application. In 3943, this
proposal was accepted by the Army, and work began on the ENIAC. The resulting
machine was enormous, weighing 30 tons, occupying 15,000 square feet of floor
space, and containing more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. When operating, it
consumed 140 kilowatts of power. It was also substantially faster than any
electromechanical computer, being capable of 5000 additions per second.
       The ENIAC was a decimal rather than a binary machine. That is, numbers
were represented in decimal form and arithmetic was performed in the decimal
system. Its memory consisted of 20 "accumulators," each capable of holding a 10-
digit decimal number. Each digit was represented by a ring of 10 vacuum tubes. At
any time, only one vacuum tube was in the ON state, representing one of the 10
digits. The major drawback of the ENIAC was that it had to be programmed
manually by setting switches and plugging and unplugging cables.