2019-2020年高中英语必修10Module5High-techLiving-Backgroundination.doc

2019-2020年高中英语必修10Module5High-techLiving-BackgroundinformationThe History of the puterThe history of puters starts about 200 years ago. Blaise Pascal was famous for building the first digital puter in 1642. Later Leibniz invented a special stepped gear mechanism. The prototypes made by Pascal and Leibniz were not used in many places, and considered strange until a little more than a century later, when Thomas of Colmar created the first successful calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. While he was developing the desktop calculator, some interesting developments in puters were started by Charles baggage in Cambridge, England.Between 1850 and 1900 great progress were made in mathematical physics, and it was known that most meaningful dynamic phenomena could be identified by differential equations so that easy means for their calculation would be helpful.The invention of punched cards was a step to automated puting. That was used with puters by Herman Hollerith and James Powers in 1890. They developed devices that could read the information stored in the cards by themselves.panies saw these advantages and developed better punch card, which used puters produced by International Business Machines (IBM), Remington ( the same people that make shavers), Burroughs, and other panies. These puters used electromechanical devices in which electrical power changed into mechanical power.World War produced a large need for puter capacity, especially for the army. In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, decided to build a high-speed electronic puter to do the job. This machine was known as ENIAC ( Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator). It is monly considered the first high-speed electronic digital puter ( EDC) and was used from 1946 to 1955. Von Neumann contributed a new idea of how practical, yet fast puters should be organized and built. These ideas of stored-program technique were essential and were widely used. The first generation of electronic puters with these advantages were until in 1947.Early in the 50s the discoveries of the magnetic core memory and the Transistor-Circuit Element changed the image of the electronic-puter field, from fast but unreliable hardware to an image of relatively high reliability and even more capability.1960s was turning point. In this period, puter producers began to provide puters of different prices and capabilities, as well as accessories.The trend during the 1970s was moving away from very powerful, single-purpose puters and toward a larger range of applications for cheaper puter systems. Most continuous-process manufacturing now used puters of smaller capability for controlling and regulation their jobs.In the 1980s, very large scale integration ( VLSI ) became popular. Many panies, such as Apple puter and Radio Shack, produced very successful personal puters ( PCs ) in the 1970s partly because of a fad in puter games. In the 1980s apple and IBM kept strong in the crowded PC field. In the production of semiconductor chips, the Intel and Motorola Corporations were very petitive, although Japanese panies were making great progress, especially in the area of memory chips. By the late 1980s, at a time, could process about 4 000 000 instructions per second.Microprocessors equipped with read-only memory (ROM) now functioned a lot in process-control, testing, monitoring, and diagnosing.Cray Research and Control Data Inc. dominated the field of superputers, or the most powerful puter systems, through the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1980s, however, the Japanese government announced a large plan to develop a new generation of superputers. This new generation, the so-called “fifth” generation. Equipped with new technologies in large integration, they can amaze feats in the field of artificial intelligence, like voice recognition.Progress in software has not matched the great advances in hardware. Software is the main cost of many systems because programming productivity has not increased quickly. New programming techniques. Such as object-oriented programming, have been developed to solve this problem. Despite difficulties with software, however, the cost per calculation of puters is rapidly decreasing, while their abilities will increase in the early future.The puter field continues to experience huge growth. puter networking, puter mail, and electronic publishing are just a few of the applications in recent years. Progress in technologies continues to produce cheaper and more powerful puters. It shows that in the near future, puters or terminals will enter into most, if not all homes, offices, and schools.