1. In 1832, an English inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage was commissioned by the British government to develop a system for calculating the rise and fall of the tides.
2. Babbage designed a device and called it an analytical engine. It was the first programmable computer, complete wit punched cards for data input. Babbage gave the engine the ability to perform different types of mathematical operations. The machine was not confined to simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. It had its own "memory", due to which the machine could use different combinations and sequences of operations to suit the purposes of the operator.
3. The machine of his dream was never realized in his life. Yet Babbage's idea didn't die with him. Other scientists made attempts to build mechanical, general-purpose, stored-program computers throughout the next century. In 1941 a relay computer was built in Germany by Conrad Zuse.It was a major step towards the realization of Babbage's dream.
4. Nothing epitomizes modern life better than the computer. For better or worse, computers have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Today computers do much more than simply computer.
5. But everything started in 1946s when the rapidly advancing field of electronics led to construction of the first general-purpose electronic computer in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. That device contained 18,000 vacuum tubes and had a speed of several hundred multiplications per minute. Its program was wired into the processor and had to be manually altered. This way the first generation of computers appeared. They were characterized by the fact that each computer had a different binary-coded program called a machine language that told it how to operate. This made the computer difficult to program and limited its versatility and speed. Other distinctive features of first generation computers were the use of vacuum tubes and magnetic drums for data storage.
6. By 1948 the invention of the transistor greatly changed the computers development. The use of the transistor in the computers began in the late 1950s. It marked the advent of smaller, faster elements than it was possible to create with the use of vacuum-tube machines. As a result, the size of electronic machinery has been shrinking ever since. Coupled with early advances in magnetic-core memory, transistors led to second generation computers that were smaller, faster, more reliable and more energy-efficient than their predecessors. Throughout the early 1960s, there were a number of commercially successful second generation computers used in business, universities, and government.
7. Jack Kilby, an American engineer, developed the integrated circuit in 1958. The integrated circuit combined three electronic components onto a small silicon disc, which was made from quartz. Scientists later managed to fit even more components on a single chip, called a semiconductor. As a result, computers became ever smaller as more components were squeezed onto a chip. They were computers of the third generation. Another third-generation development included the use of an operating system that allowed machines to run many different programs at once with a central program that monitored and coordinated the computer's memory.
8. After the invention of integrated circuits, the only place to go was down - in size. In 1981, IBM introduced its personal computer for use in the office, home and schools. The 1980s saw an expansion in computer use, made the personal computer even more affordable. The number of personal computers in use doubled in 1982. Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used. Computers continued their trend toward smaller size, working their way down from desktop to laptop computers, which could fit inside a briefcase, then to palmtop which are able to fit inside a breast pocket. In direct competition with IBM's PC was Apple's Macintosh line, introduced in 1984 notable for its user-friendly design, the Macintosh offered an operating system that allowed users to move screen icons instead of typing instructions. Users controlled the screen cursor using a mouse, a device that mimicked the movement of one's hand on the computer screen.
9. Defining the fifth generation of computers is somewhat difficult because the field is in infancy. Using recent engineering advances, computers may be able to accept spoken word instructions and imitate human reasoning. The ability to translate a foreign language is also a major goal of fifth generation computers. Computers today have some attributes of fifth generation computers.
In fact, the fifth generation of computers is the beginning of artificial intelligence.
Notes:
1. to wire — впаювати
2. desktop — настільний комп’ютер
3. laptop — невеличкий портативний комп’ютер
4. palmtop — портативний комп’ютер
5. infancy — рання стадія розвитку
6. to epitomize — характеризувати, представляти