Text b steve jobs and the NeXt computer

On April Fools Day of 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the Apple Computer Company to sell the personal computers they were building in a garage. For nine years, Jobs served in various positions with the company, including president and chairman of the board, as it grew into a giant in the personal computer field. During this time, he was instrumental in developing both the extremely popular Apple II and Macintosh lines of computers, the latter being notable for its graphical user interface and easy-to-use operating system.

In 1985, Jobs left Apple to found a new company—NeXT, Inc. Three years later, on October 12, 1988, Jobs introduced a high-performance personal computer called the NeXT computer. It was originally aimed at the academic market but has since been modified for use in nonacademic situations. The NeXT is based on the Motorola 68040 chip—the same series of chip used in the Macintosh.

While the NeXT contains several technological innovations, including a 256-Mbyte erasable and removable optical disk, a 2.88-Mbyte microfloppy disk drive, and a new chip technology that gives "mainframe performance," possibly the greatest long-term contribution of the NeXT will be its operating system. The NeXT uses a variation of the UNIX operating system with a graphical user interface called NeXTStep. Although UNIX has long been known for its power, especially for multiple users and multitasking, it has also been criticized for being difficult to use. The graphically oriented NeXTStep offers an easier way to use the power of UNIX. In fact, IBM thought so much of NeXTStep that it has licensed its use on its UNIX-based machines.

Major software applications have been modified to run on the NeXT computer using the NeXTStep operating system. These include packages from Lotus, WordPerfect, and Oracle. Possibly, the crucial new application that will attract new users to NeXT is the Improv spreadsheet from Lotus Development Corporation. Designed specifically for the NeXT, Improv is said to clear up some complications associated with using spreadsheets by using English commands rather than a numerical syntax.

Source: James Daly, "Job's NeXT Unveils Do-or-Die Systems Software," Computerworld

Text c learning a foreign language with hypertext

Data bases are primarily used to provide users with needed information. The information is usually stored in fields, records, and files, and specific commands are used to retrieve the information. A form of electronic information retrieval that is becoming more popular, however, is provided by hypertext.

Hypertext allows its users to navigate a data base more freely, because it is largely free of the constrictions imposed by traditional data bases. Unlike traditional data bases, hypertext stores information in discrete nodes or groups that can be reached from any other node. This is possible because hypertext's author created links within the system. The system links, in turn, allow the user to link anything in the document, including words, phrases, or specified strings in the file. Therefore, navigation within the data base is motivated by the user's mental connections.

As an example of the application of hypertext to a familiar situation, consider the often painstaking process most high school and college students go through to learn a foreign language. Traditionally, students learn a language's grammar rules and vocabulary before they progress to reading blocks of text. Now, a computer system called Transparent Language uses hypertext to enable a beginning foreign language student to read popular text material almost immediately.

This is possible because the software allows students to translate the text as they read. The text is presented at the top of the computer screen, and the student positions the cursor on a line, word, or phrase that he or she wants to translate. The translation, grammatical structure, and verb tense of the selected word or passage appear in a window at the bottom of the screen; therefore, if the reader does not understand a portion of the text, a quick look at the bottom of the screen explains its meaning. The system includes various texts or stories and a linguistic data base for each text. The data base was created by language experts, who entered information at the rate of 5 hours per page, and includes five languages—English, Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

This method of language learning is based on a linguistic theory called "comprehensible input," which proposes that people learn a language better by having repeated encounters with real words in real text, in the same way children learn new words from their parents, than by traditional systems. For example, school administrators traditionally set aside an entire year for high school students and a semester for college students studying Latin to translate the Aeneid; but with the Transparent Language hypertext system, the Aeneid can be read in a few hours.

Source: Daniel J. Lyons, "Program Eases Learning of Foreign Languages," PC Week