1.3. Read and translate the text microsoft company

Paul Allen and Bill Gates founded the Company in 1975.

Microsoft is best-known American company involved in software production.

Microsoft's wealth and power is growing up for years. It is a giant company. Microsoft's $25 billion market value tops that of Ford, General Motors.

Some time ago, Microsoft dominated the PC market with its MS-DOS operating system, the basic software that let the computer understand your commands and carry them out, appeared in the beginning of 80s. MS-DOS ran on 90 percent of the worlds IBM and IBM-clone computers. Then, Microsoft has extended that presence with releasing of Windows, which is probably the most important and popular operating system in the World. And now it dominates the market.

Firstly, Microsoft released Windows '95 in 1995. It was a graphics interface environment that ran on top of MS-DOS and replaced DOS in future versions. Then, Microsoft released Windows '98, Windows NT, Windows Millenni­um, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Microsoft also supplies about 50 percent of the world's software applications. Among them, there are three well-known Office Packs; they are also called Microsoft Office programs such as Excel (spreadsheets), Microsoft Word (word processing), Access (data bases) and Outlook Express (e-mail). There were releases in 1997, 2000, and 2002, when appeared Microsoft Office XP. Microsoft is also in the market of networking, multimedia and even books. And as an early supporter of the Macintosh computer, Microsoft virtually owns the Mac application market.

It has been calculated that Microsoft controls 80-85 % of the entire PC software industry. The company has hundreds of products and thousands of employees, making it one of the largest companies. Many of the company's shareholders are now millionaires and a few including Bill Gates and Paul Allen are billionaires. Microsoft is no doubt the fastest growing company in the PC software industry.

1.4. Read and translate the text computer organization

When we refer to a digital computer or a data processor, we usually mean what is known as a stored-program machine. A program is a series of instructions to the machine (e.g., add the number in memory location X to the present contents of the accumulator, shift the accumulator contents right by 3-bit places, etc.). The execution of these instruc­tions in the proper sequence causes the machine to perform the desired overall task. If a machine is designed to do on­ly a simple or fixed series of steps, the sequence can be wired into the machine; this is known as a wired-program ma­chine. In a stored-program machine, the series of instruc­tions are stored in a memory within the computer. Each in­struction is read from memory, in the appropriate order, and then decoded and executed. To change the task the ma­chine performs, all that is necessary is to change the stored instructions (although it should be noted that in practice the preparation and checking of the programs often is very time consuming and expensive).

The accomplishment of a given task typically might in­volve performing a million instructions in sequence. If this had to be prepared beforehand as one long string of a mil­lion instructions, and fed into the machine in that form, the cost of program preparation would be prohibitive and the computer speed would be held down to that of the input device feeding the program in. Instead, advantage is taken of the fact that the total task can be broken into a number of short subroutines, which recur frequently throughout the overall task. Some subroutines can be used in exactly the same form each time; others require only that the memory addresses involved in the instructions be modified each time the subroutine is used. The actual program fed into the machine might consist of only a thousand instructions, which include the subroutines, plus possibly some instruc­tions for modifying the address used in the subroutines (many computers have special hardware for this purpose), plus "jump" type instructions. A jump instruction can be used to cause the machine to end the present subroutine, and jump to another or back to the beginning of the one just finished.

The complete set of different instructions a given machine is capable of performing is its instruction repertoire. The number and variety of instructions included in different machines cover a wide range. It has been shown that any digital computation can be performed by a combination of a few very basic instructions. However, the processing time required by such a machine would be impractically long. Today's computers have a repertoire of from about 15 to over 100 different instructions.

An instruction always contains an operation code, which specifies the particular instruction (e.g., add, store in memo­ry, etc.), and ordinarily at least one memory address. Most machines are single-address machines. The address usually specifies either an address in memory from which the oper­and is to be read and then used in performing the specified operation, or the address in which data are to be stored. A single-address machine, after executing an instruction, nor­mally obtains the next instruction from the memory loca­tion immediately following; although in a jump-type in­struction, the address contained in the instruction is used to cause it to go to the specified address to obtain the next instruction. Some machines are of the two-address, three-address, or four-address type. The additional addresses con­tained in an instruction can be used in many ways, e.g., to specify an additional operand address, the address of the next instruction, or where the results of the operation are to be stored.