1、Unit One,History of the Computer,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,Training target: In this part, our target is to train your reading comprehension. We have made the flexible sentences strong black and marked the subject, predicate and have object of them. Try to grasp the main idea of these sen

2、tences.,主語、謂語、賓語,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,Electronic computer was one of the greatest inventions in the 20th century. Once talking about computer, we have to think of the birth of ENIAC(Electric Numerical Integrator And Calculator)( Pic 1.1).,electronic adj. 電子的, 電子學(xué)的 numerical adj. 數(shù)字的

3、, 數(shù)值的 integrator n. 積分器 calculator n. 計(jì)數(shù)器,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,The start of World War II produced a large need for computer capacity, especially for the military. New weapons were made for which trajectory tables and other essential data were needed. In 1946, John P. Eckert, John W.

4、 Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC. The size of ENIACs numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could multiply two of thes

5、e numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was therefore about 1,000 times faster then the previous generation of relay computers.,trajectory table 彈道表,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,ENIAC used 18,000 vac

6、uum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, weighed 30 tons and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (0.0002 seconds) read-wr

7、ite register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate “units” of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a “route” for the flow of information. ENIAC was commonly accepted as the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and had be

8、en used from 1946 to 1955,vacuum tube n. 電子管 punched card n. 穿孔卡片 counter n. 計(jì)數(shù)器,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,but it had a number of shortcomings which were not solved, notably the inability to store a program. A number of improvements were also made to ENIAC from 1948, based on the ideas o

9、f the Hungarian-American, mathematician John Von Neumann (Pic 1.2)who was called the father of computer.,shortcoming n. 缺點(diǎn) Hungarian adj. 匈牙利的,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,Von Neumann contributed a new awareness of how practical, yet fast computers should be organized and built. These ideas

10、, usually referred to as the stored-program technique, became essential for future generations of high-speed digital computers and were universally adopted. Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) designed by Von Neumann was built in 1952. This computer used 2,300 vacuum tubes, but i

11、ts speed was 10 times faster than ENIAC which used 18,000 vacuum tubes. And the most important, Random Access Memory (RAM) was used.,universally adv. 普遍地 random adj. 隨機(jī)的 access n. 存取,訪問,Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC,electronic adj. 電子的，電子學(xué)的 numerical adj. 數(shù)字的,數(shù)值的 integrator n. 積分器 calculator

12、 n. 計(jì)數(shù)器 vacuum tube n. 電子管 multiplier n. 乘法器 divider n. 除法器 decimal n. 十進(jìn)制的 punched card n. 穿孔卡片 counter n. 計(jì)數(shù)器,Key Words,Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,Training target: In this part our target is to train your reading speed. You should pay more attention to “keywords”. We have marked k

13、eywords in some paragraphs. You can quickly grasp the main idea of the sentences and paragraphs by these keywords, the rest can be practiced by yourself. It will raise your reading speed.,關(guān)鍵詞,Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,The use of the transistor in computers in the late 1950s marked

14、the coming of the second-generation computers. The most notable change was that transistors replaced vacuum tubes. This meant that the advent of smaller, faster, more reliable and less expensive computers than that were possible with vacuum-tube machines. In addition, the second-generation computers

15、 were given auxiliary storage, sometimes called external or secondary storage. Data were stored outside the computer on either magnetic tapes or magnetic disks. Using magnetic tapes or magnetic disks for input and output operations increased the speed of the computer.,transistor n. 晶體管 auxiliary adj

16、. 輔助的 magnetic adj. 磁的,磁性的,Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,RAM capacities increased from 8,000 to 64,000 words in commercially available machines by the 1960s, with access times of 2 to 3 ms (milliseconds). These machines were very expensive to purchase or even to rent and were particula

17、rly expensive to operate because of the cost of expanding programming. Such computers were mostly found in large computer centers operated by industry, government, and private laboratoriesstaffed with many programmers and support personnel. Late in the 1960s the integrated circuit, or IC, was introd

18、uced, making it possible for many transistors to be included on one silicon chip. Therefore, the computers became even smaller and cheaper while their memory capacities became larger.,millisecond n. 毫秒 staff v. 為配備人員 integrate v. 集合,集成 Circuit n. 電路 silicon chip n. 硅片,Passage Two The Advancement of

19、the Computer,The microprocessor became a reality in the mid-1970s with the large-scale integrated (LSI) circuit. The earliest microcomputer, the Altair 8800, was developed in 1975 by Ed Roberts; this machine used the Intel microprocessor and had less than 1 kilobyte of memory. In the 1980s, very lar

20、ge-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit, in which hundreds of thousands of electronic components were etched into a single silicon chip, became more and more common. Many companies, some new to the computer field, introduced in the 1970s programmable minicomputers supplied with software packages. The “sh

21、rinking” trend continued with the introduction of personal computers(PCs), which are programmable machines small enough and inexpensive enough to be purchased and used by individuals.,microprocessor n. 微處理器 etch v. 蝕刻,Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,By the late 1980s, some personal compu

22、ters were run by microprocessors that, handling 32 bits of data at a time, could process about 4,000,000 instructions per second. Microprocessors equipped with read-only memory(ROM), which storage constantly used, unchanging programs, now performed an increased number of process-control, testing, mo

23、nitoring, and diagnosing functions, like automobile ignition systems, automobile-engine diagnosis, and production-line inspection duties. From the integrated circuit to large-scale integration and to very- large-scale integration, this was the start of the microprocessor age. The microprocessor cont

24、inued to improve from the 80286, 80386 to the 80486, then Pentium, Pentium and so on.,Monitor v. 監(jiān)視 Diagnose v. 診斷,識別 automobile ignition 汽車點(diǎn)火,Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,Modern digital computers are all conceptually similar, regardless of the size. They can be divided into several c

25、ategories on the basis of cost and performance: the personal computer or microcomputer, a relatively low-cost machine, usually of desktop size. It also includes laptops which are small enough to fit in a briefcase and palmtops which can fit into a pocket; the workstation, a microcomputer with enhanc

26、ed graphics and communications capabilities that make it especially useful for office work; the minicomputer, generally too expensive for personal use, is suitable for a business, school, or laboratory; the mainframe computer, a large, expensive machine which meets the needs of major business enterp

27、rises, government departments, scientific research establishments; the supercomputer, the largest and fastest computer.,microcomputer n.微型計(jì)算機(jī) Desktop adj. 桌面的,臺式的 Workstation n. 工作站 minicomputer n. 小型計(jì)算機(jī) mainframe n. 主機(jī),大型機(jī) supercomputer n. 巨型計(jì)算機(jī),Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,The “fift

28、h-generation” computer is using new technologies in very large integration, along with new programming language, and will be capable of amazing feats in the area of artificial intelligence, voice recognition. One important parallel-processing approach is neural network, which mimics the architecture

29、 of the nervous system. This picture (Pic1.3) shows Chinas first petaflop/s scale supercomputerTianhe-1.The Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) recently unveiled Chinas fastest supercomputer, also the world fifth fastest computer, which is able to do more than one petaflop calcu

30、la-tions per second theoretically at its peak speed. The TH-1 is made up of 80 compute cabinets including 2560 compute nodes and 512 operation nodes.,artificial adj. 人工的 Intelligence n. 智能 recognition n. 識別 neural adj. 神經(jīng)的 mimic v. 模仿 petaflop n. 千萬億次 unveil v. 展出 peak adj. 最高的,Passage Two The Advan

31、cement of the Computer,The TH-1 system will be used to provide high performance computing service for the Tianjin area and the northeast of China. NSCC（National Supercomputer Computer Center）-TJ plans to use this system to solve the computing problems in data processing for petroleum exploration and

32、 the simulation of large aircraft designs. Other uses for the TH-1 supercomputer include the sciences, financial, automotive and shipping industries. One continuing trend in computer development is micro- miniaturization, the effort to compress more circuit elements into smaller and smaller chip spa

33、ce.,petroleum n. 石油 simulation n. 模擬 financial adj. 金融的 microminiaturization n. 微小型化,Passage Two The Advancement of the Computer,transistor n. 晶體管 auxiliary storage 輔助存儲器 magnetic tape 磁帶 magnetic disk 磁盤 integrated circuit（IC） 集成電路 LSI 大規(guī)模集成電路 kilobyte n. 千字節(jié) VLSI 超大規(guī)模集成電路 silicon chip n. 硅片 microc

34、omputer n. 微型計(jì)算機(jī) microprocessor n. 微處理器 palmtop n. 掌上型計(jì)算機(jī) laptop n. 便攜式計(jì)算機(jī) minicomputer n. 小型計(jì)算機(jī) workstation n. 工作站 supercomputer n. 超級計(jì)算機(jī) mainframe n. 主機(jī),大型機(jī) artificial intelligence 人工智能 voice recognition 語音識別 neural network 神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò),Key Words,Reading Computer Ongoing,Training target: Read the followin

35、g reading materials and use the reading skills mentioned in the passage above. There may be some new words in the reading materials, just try to guess the meaning and put your dictionary aside.,Reading Computer Ongoing,Whats a Wearable? Wearable computers are the next wave of portable computing and

36、they will go way beyond laptops. Imagine watching a movie projected through your eyeglasses onto a virtual screen that seems to float in your field of vision. Or imagine working on an automobile, an airplane, or an underwater mission and reading an instruction manual, communicating with co-workers,

37、or inputting data via computerall without lifting a finger from the task at hand. To date, personal computers have not lived up to their name. Most machines sit on the desk and interact with their owners for only a small fraction of the day. Smaller and faster notebook computers have made mobility l

38、ess of an issue, but the same staid user paradigm persists.,Reading Computer Ongoing,Wearable computer (Pic1.4) hopes to shatter this myth of how a computer should be used. A wearable computer is a very personal computer. A persons computer should be worn, such as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, an

39、d interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant.,Reading Computer Ongoing,M

40、icro Optical Corp., based in Westwood, Mass., has designed two models of an eyeglass display one that clips onto the side of the users glasses, and one integrated directly into the eyewear. Though the user still needs a CPU a laptop, a wearable computer, or even a DVD player or cell phone the monito

41、r or screen is actually projected through the users eyeglasses. Gerg Jenkins, sales manager at Micro Optical, says the LCD is positioned near the users temple. A projected image passes through the lenses of regular eyeglasses, bounces off a mirror, and displays the illusion of a full-size monitor fl

42、oating in front of the users face. The display weighs less than an ounce, so its much more comfortable than some of the earlier head-mounted displays.,Reading Computer Ongoing,WetPC Called the WetPC (Pic 1.5), it comprised a miniature personal computer with a mask-mounted virtual display and a novel

43、 one-handed controllercalled a Kord Pad. The computer was mounted in a waterproof housing on the divers air tank. A cable from it was connected to the waterproof virtual display which presented the diver with a high contrast display “floating” in the field of view. A second cable was connected to th

44、e Kord Pad, a 5-key device which the diver could hold in either hand and which was used to control the computer by pressing single or multiple keys. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) shows the user which key (or keys) to press.,Reading Computer Ongoing,The GUI facilitates the wear ability and usabili

45、ty of the WetPCunderwater computer. It was the result of several years of research into interface design and functionality. Rather like playing the piano, the user can interact with the computer in a very natural waythe diver can access and record information with one hand, even while swimming. The WetPC can help salvage-divers, maritime archeologists, and police divers find objects, record or look up information, or simply monitor their location at all times. Scientists could use the unit for mapping and mo