Reading. History of Computers

1. Read the text and find the equivalents of the following phrases.

1. вносить вклад в развитие компьютеров 6. выполнять тысячи вычислений в секунду

2. попытки заменить человека 7. быть не только громоздким, но и ненадежным

3. период времени 8. основанный на искусственном интеллекте

4. выделяли большое количество тепла 9. способный к обучению

5. могли решать одну задачу за раз 10. реагировать на голосовые команды

"Who invented the computer?" is not a question with a simple answer. The real answer is that many inventors have contributed to the development of the computer and that a computer is a complex piece of machinery made up of many parts, each of which is a separate invention.

Before the abacus was invented, people had used their fingers to count. In the 18^th century a Scotsman Napier invented a mechanical way of multiplying and dividing. It was a foundation of modern slide rules. Later Henry Briggs used Napier's ideas to produce logarithm tables. There had never been any attempts to replace a human being before an Englishman Charles Babbage designed his "Analytical Engine" in 1830. In the same year an American Bush built the first analogue computer. The first digital computer called Mark I was completed in 1944 by Professor Aiken from IBM.

Before the modern computers appeared, there had been several generations of computers and several technological principles had been applied. The first vacuum tubes computers used from 1950 to 1959 are referred to as first generation computers. First generation computers relied on machine language to perform operations, and they could only solve one problem at a time. Input was based on punched cards and paper tape, and output was displayed on printouts. UNIVAC 1 (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) is an example of these computers which used to perform thousands of calculations per second. Those devices were not only bulky, they were also unreliable. The thousands of vacuum tubes emitted large amounts of heat and burned out frequently.

The transistor was invented in 1948 and replaced vacuum tubes in the second generation of computers. It allowed computers to become smaller, faster, cheaper, more energy-efficient and more reliable than their first-generation predecessors. Second-generation computers still used to rely on punched cards for input and printouts for output.

With advances in electronics technology it became possible to reduce the size of transistors and integrate large numbers of circuit elements into very small chips of silicon. The computers that used integrated circuit technology were called third generation computers, and the approximate time span of these machines was from 1960 to 1979. They could perform many data processing operations in nanoseconds, which are billionths of seconds.

The microprocessor brought the fourth generation of computers, as thousands of integrated circuits were built onto a single silicon chip. The Intel 4004 chip, developed in 1971, located on a single chip all the components of the computer - from the central processing unit and memory to input/output controls.

The fifth generation of computers has now arrived. The idea was introduced by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Fifth generation computing devices, based on artificial intelligence, are still in development, though there are some applications, such as voice recognition, that are used today. With the use of parallel processing and superconductors the artificial intelligence has been made a reality. Quantum computation and molecular and nanotechnology will change the computers in some years. The goal of fifth-generation computing is to develop devices that respond to natural language input and are capable of learning. Some of the advanced modern computers have some characteristics of fifth generation computers.