V. Fill in the prepositions if necessary:

An integrated circuit (IC) is a collection of electronic components fabricated … a semiconductor device or chip. Integrated circuits are widely used … consumer, commercial and industrial applications. With high developments … technology, integrated circuits have become the most important unit in electric products. Integrated circuits are used in a wide area … commercial and consumer technology, including, for example, calculators, computers, video games, digital watches, and the like. Integrated circuit technology has made significant progress over the last forty years. Integrated circuits are now manufactured … much lower costs, with lower power consumption, higher speeds, and smaller sizes. An integrated circuit is a complete electronic circuit, containing transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors, along with their interconnecting electrical conductors, contained entirely … a single chip of silicon. An integrated circuit includes multiple layers of wiring that interconnect its electronic and circuit components. These layers made … metal, semiconductor and insulator material, each configured so that it cooperates … other layers to define circuit elements, such as buffers, memory devices, gates and routing wires. Each layer is stacked or overlaid on a prior layer and patterned to form the shapes that define devices and connect the devices into circuits. The metal layers define routing wires for connecting together various elements, including memory matrices. Generally, integrated circuits are mainly divided … two categories: logic device and memory, wherein the logic device, such as a microprocessor of a computer, is used to execute logic operations, and the memory is a semiconductor device used … storing data.

VI. Answer the following questions:

1. What is the characteristic feature of the 1-st generation computers?

2. What are the advantages of the 1-st generation?

3. What are the disadvantages of this generation?

4. What was the principal form of primary storage technology?

5. What important development came with the second generation computing?

6. When did higher-level languages appear?

7. What higher-level languages do you know?

8. What are the advantages of higher-level languages?

9. When did the electronics industry begin to make silicon chips?

10. Why did the integrated circuit begin to replace the transistor?

11. Why is silicon so widely used?

12. What are the most important characteristics of the chips?

13. What is an important form of multiprogramming?

14. What is the most important development of the 4th generation computers?

15. What did two innovations in LSI technology lead to?

16. When was VLSI achieved?

17. When did the development of the 5-th generation begin?

18. Enumerate all the desired features of the 5-th computer generation.

Read and translate the text.

Charles Babbage and His Inventions

An eccentric mathematician and a genius, Charles Babbage was a prolific inventor, whose inventions included the ophthalmoscope (for examining the retina of the eye), the skeleton key, the locomotive “cow catcher”, and the speedometer. He also pioneered operations research, the science of carrying out business and industrial operations as efficiently as possible. Babbage was a fellow of the Royal Society, and at Cambridge University he held the same chair that was once held by Isaac Newton, the most famous of British scientists.

The mathematical tables of the 19^th century were full of mistakes. Even when the tables were calculated correctly, the printed versions often contained typographical errors. Because people who published new tables often copied old ones, the same errors cropped up in table after table.

Babbage set out to build a machine that would not only calculate, but would also automatically print. He called the machine the Difference Engine because it worked by solving what mathematicians call “difference equations”. The name is somewhat misleading in that the machine constructs tables using repeated additions, not subtractions.

However, struck by a much better idea Babbage abandoned the Difference Engine. He wanted to build a punched-card-controlled calculator. He called his proposed automatic calculator the Analytical Engine.

The Difference Engine could compute only tables. But the Analytical Engine could carry out any calculation. All a person had to do was punch the cards with instructions for the desired calculations.

The Analytical Engine had many of the major components found in modern computers. Babbage referred to the machine’s main memory as “the store”; the terms “store” and “storage” are still sometimes used to refer to main memory. The Analytical Engine’s central processing unit consisted of “the mill”, which carried out arithmetical calculations, and “the barrel”, which actuated the parts of the machine needed to carry out each instruction. Today we would call the mill the arithmetic/logic unit and the barrel the control unit. Input data for the Analytical Engine was on punched cards, and its output was printed on paper.

Had the Analytical Engine been completed, it would have been a 19yh-century computer. But alas, that was not to be. The British Government had already sunk thousands of pounds into the Difference Engine and had received nothing in return. It had no intention of making the same mistake with the Analytical Engine. No working Analytical Engine was ever built, and Babbage’s work was forgotten until after the same discoveries had been made independently by the computer pioneers of the 20^th century.

Topic for Discussion.

If Charles Babbage succeeded in building a mechanical computer around the middle of the 19^th century, how might our present use of computers and our attitudes to them be different?