The Мotherboard Background

The original IBM PC contained the original PC motherboard. In this design, which premiered in 1982, the motherboard itself was a large printed circuit card that contained the 8088 microprocessor, the BIOS, sockets for the CPU's RAM and a collection of slots that auxiliary cards could plug into. If you wanted to add a floppy disk drive or a parallel port or a joystick, you bought a separate card and plugged it into one of the slots. This approach was pioneered in the mass market by the Apple II machine. By making it easy to add cards, Apple and IBM accomplished two huge things:

They made it easy to add new features to the machine over time.

They opened the computer to creative opportunities for third-party vendors.

Different motherboards of different vintages typically have different form factors. The form factor is essentially the size, shape and design of the actual motherboard. There are more than a half-dozen form factors for motherboards -- check out PC Guide's Motherboard Form Factors to find out about the various designations.

The motherboard, by enabling pluggable components, allows users to personalize a computer system depending on their applications and needs.

ТЕКСТ 3

Inside a Microprocessor

To understand how a microprocessor works, it is helpful to look inside and learn about the logic used to create one. In the process you can also learn about assembly language -- the native language of a microprocessor -- and many of the things that engineers can do to boost the speed of a processor.

A microprocessor executes a collection of machine instructions that tell the processor what to do. Based on the instructions, a microprocessor does three basic things:

Using its ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit), a microprocessor can perform mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Modern microprocessors contain complete floating point processors that can perform extremely sophisticated operations on large floating point numbers.

A microprocessor can move data from one memory location to another.

A microprocessor can make decisions and jump to a new set of instructions based on those decisions.

There may be very sophisticated things that a microprocessor does, but those are its three basic activities.

ТЕКСТ 4

History of robotics

The concept of robots dates back to ancient times, when some myths told of mechanical beings brought to life. Such automata also appeared in the clockwork fig­ures of medieval churches, and in the 18th century some clockmakers gained fame for the clever mechanical fig­ures that they constructed. Today the term automaton is usually applied to these handcrafted, mechanical (rather than electromechanical) devices that imitate the motions of living creatures. Some of the «robots» used in advertising and entertainment are actually automata, even with the addition of remote radio control.

The term robot itself is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning “compulsory labour”. It was first used by the Czech novelist and playwright Karel Chapek to describe a mechanical device that looks like a human but, lacking human sensibility, can perform only automatic, mechanical operations. Robots as they are known today do not only imitate human or other living forms. True robots did not become possible, however, until the inven­tion of the computer in the 1940s and the miniaturiza­tion of computer parts. One of the first true robots was an experimental model designed by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute in the late 1960s. It was ca­pable of arranging blocks into stacks through the use of a television camera as a visual sensor, processing this information in a small computer.

Computers today are equipped with microprocessors that can handle the data being fed to them by various sensors of the surrounding environment. Making use of the principle of feedback, robots can change their opera­tions to some degree in response to changes in that envi­ronment. The commercial use of robots is spreading, with the increasing automation of factories, and they have become essential to many laboratory procedures. Japan is the most advanced nation exploring robot technology. Nowadays robots continue to expand their applications. The home-made robots available today may be one sign of the future.

ТЕКСТ 5