| 1) What was the achievement of the first industrial revolution?
2) What was the task of the second one?
3) What is a computer?
4) What can it make?
5) What can you use it for?
| 6) What does a person need to become a computer?
7) What can be the rate1 of computing?
8) How old is the idea of an automatic digital computer?
9) How old is the computer?
1rate– зд. скорость.
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The 20th century is the century of the second industrial revolution. The achievement of the first revolution was to replace human muscles by machines. The task of the second one is to use electronic computers instead of human brain.
A computer is a person or a machine that can take in information, perform reasonable operations upon the information, and put out answers. This process is called computing. For example, a human being aided bya pencil and paper may be a computer. He may take in information, write some of it on the paper, perform reasonable operations the information and give an answer. Likewise amachine is able to take in information, record it inside the machine, perform reasonable operations upon that information and put out the result. Both are computers.
We can make a computer do anything that we can express as a series of arithmetic operations. Most modern electronic computers can do over billions operations реr second.
The idea of an automatic digital computer, a machine able to perform a number of operations both arithmetic and logical in a reasonable sequence is more than 120 years old. But the reality, a physically existing machine it no older than 1944. That was the year when the first one of the modern automatic digital computers started operating; it was the Harvard IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator also called the Harvard Mark I.
1.1 Divide Text 1A into paragraphs and give a headline to each one.
