I. Read the title and subtitles of the text and predict what the text is about. Scan the text and say if you were a success in guessing the content of it.

Text A

Historical perspective

As people learn new things, they use that knowledge to generate more new information. The more information they have, the more they try to find better ways to store it, process it, and retrieve it. During the past forty years, a giant leap has been made in dealing with information. Men and women have developed high-speed computers which accept, store, process, and give out information. The computers work faster than people like Pascal or Hollerith ever dreamed possible.

The age of "modern computers" began in 1944. That year an American engineer at Harvard University, Howard Aiken, built a computer. It worked very much like a machine designed more than 100 years earlier – Babbage's Analytical Engine. Aiken's computer, called the Mark I, accepted information through punched cards. It stored and processed the information. It printed the results on an electric typewriter. The Mark I was able to do many different tasks. It was a huge machine. It took up the space of a school gymnasium. It took only a few seconds to calculate a math problem – quite a feat for 1944! The Mark I is known today as the world's first electro-mechanical computer.

Soon after the invention of the Mark I, scientists began to build computers that had almost no moving parts. That is, they were electronic rather than mechanical. Most of the computers that you'll be reading about are called digital computers. A digital computer changes information into digits to be stored and processed. Electronic digital computers quickly replaced the Mark I. In fact, a few years after the Mark I was built, electromechanical computers became old-fashioned, and weren't used any more.

There have been several major changes in digital computers during the past forty years. Each change ushered in a new "generation" of computers. Just as we have different generations of people in a family, computers have generations, too.

First-Generation Computers

As moving parts inside computers were replaced by electrical circuits, computers worked faster and more efficiently. The first all-digital computer was completed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of two engineers, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The computer, called the ENIAC, was even bigger than the Mark I. It weighed over 30 tons! It conducted electricity through vacuum tubes. In fact, the computer used over 18,000 vacuum tubes! Vacuum tubes get hot, and 18,000 of them created a lot of heat. So, it was necessary for the ENIAC to have special air conditioning units to keep it cooled down.

The ENIAC was considered quite a "brain." It was 300 times faster than the Mark I. It worked a thousand times faster than a person using a desk calculator. It was given a problem that would have taken 100 engineers, working eight hours a day, an entire year to solve. The ENIAC solved the problem in two hours.

Soon after the ENIAC was built, John von Neumann had the idea of storing a computer program in the computer's memory. Up until this time, only the numbers used in the program were stored in the memory. Von Neumann's idea enabled people to build computers that worked faster than the ENIAC. In fact, today's computers are based on von Neumann's idea of storing programs in the memory.

A few years later, in 1951, Eckert and Mauchly designed another computer called the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC was even larger than the ENIAC. Eckert and Mauchly sold the UNIVAC to the United States Census Bureau. Other models of the UNIVAC were built and sold, making the UNIVAC the first commercial computer.