THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION HASN'T HAPPENED YET UNIT 2. <...> THE FUTURE OF COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY UNIT 3. <...> OPERATING SYSTEM 4 7 10 14 17 20 24 28 32 35 39 44 49 53 58 63 68 74 78 82 86 3 Unit 1 THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION HASN'T HAPPENED YET I. Read aloud the following words and expressions, give their meanings: Horizon, descendant, device, empowerment, foreseeable, emerge, obscure, vehicle, sophisticated, fragile, subscribe, dissenter, heretical, augment. <...> Read the text and answer the questions following it: South of San Francisco and north of Silicon Valley, near the place where the pines on the horizon give way to the live oaks and radiotelescopes, an unlikely subculture has been creating a new medium for human thought. <...> The human mind is not going to be replaced by a machine, at least not in the foreseeable future, but there is little doubt that the worldwide availability of fantasy amplifiers, intellectual toolkits, and interactive electronic communities will change the way people think, learn, and communicate. <...> It looks as if this latest technology-triggered transformation of society could have even more intense impact than the last time human thought was augmented, five hundred years ago, when the Western world learned to read. <...> Because mass production of sophisticated electronic devices can lag ten years or more behind the state of the art in research prototypes, the first effects of the 4 astonishing achievements in computer science since 1960 have only begun to enter our lives. <...> Word processors, video games, educational software, and computer graphics were unknown terms to most people only ten years ago, but today they are the names for billion-dollar industries. <...> A few of the pioneers of personal computing who still work in the computer industry can remember the birth and the dream, when the notion of personal computing was an obscure heresy in the ranks of the computing priesthood. <...> The dissenters shared a vision of personal computing in which computers would be used to enhance the most creative aspects of human intelligence — for everybody, not just the techno cognoscenti. <...> They <...>
Практикум_по_чтению_по_английскому_языку.pdf
ФЕДЕРАЛЬНОЕ АГЕНТСТВО ПО ОБРАЗОВАНИЮ
ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ
УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ
ВЫСШЕГО ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ
«ВОРОНЕЖСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ
УНИВЕРСИТЕТ»
ПРАКТИКУМ ПО ЧТЕНИЮ
ПО АНГЛИЙСКОМУ ЯЗЫКУ
Учебно-методическое пособие для вузов
Составители:
И.Ю. Вострикова,
М.А. Стрельникова
Издательско-полиграфический центр
Воронежского государственного университета
2009
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CONTENTS:
UNIT 1. THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION HASN'T
HAPPENED YET
UNIT 2. THE FUTURE OF COMPUTER
TECHNOLOGY
UNIT 3. THE PATRIARCHS
UNIT 4. THE PIONEERS
UNIT 5. THE "INFONAUTS"
UNIT 6. THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE
UNIT 7. VIRTUAL MACHINES
UNIT 8. PROGRAMMING (1)
UNIT 9. PROGRAMMING (2)
UNIT 10. ENIAC
UNIT 11. THE "FIRST DRAFT" (1)
UNIT 12. THE "FIRST DRAFT" (2)
UNIT 13. CYBERNATICS (1)
UNIT 14. CYBERNATICS (2)
UNIT 15. PDP-1
UNIT 16. MACHINES TO THINK WITH
UNIT 17. THE APRA ERA
UNIT 18. COMPUTER GRAPHICS
UNIT 19. CYBERCEPTION
UNIT 20. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HAL
UNIT 21. OPERATING SYSTEM
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10
14
17
20
24
28
32
35
39
44
49
53
58
63
68
74
78
82
86
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9. Why did people's lives change radically and rapidly?
10. What were books for people?
11. What has the printed page been for the propagation of ideas?
12. When have the astonishing achievements in computer science begun to
enter our lives?
13. What terms were unknown to most people only ten years ago?
14. What single idea did the overwhelming majority of the people subscribe
to thirty years ago?
15. What was computer technology believed to be (thirty years ago)?
16. Who shared the dissenting point of view?
17. What vision did the dissenters share?
18. What was the point of view off those who questioned the dogma of data
processing? What did they wonder about?
19. What did these heretical computer theorists propose?
20. What did the minority of scientists end engineers insist on?
III. Topics for discussion:
1. A new medium for human thought.
2. Books were vehicles by which the ideas circulated among the population.
3. Personal computing was an obscure heresy.
IV. Choose one of the following topics and write a composition (150200
words):
The printed page was a medium for the propagation of ideas.
Astonishing achievements in computer science.
V. Prepare your own presentation developing one of the ideas from the text.
Words to learn:
Amplify; augment; availability; awe; calculate; communication medium; data;
device; descendant; dissenter; emerge; empower; enhance; fragile; heresy;
impact; ken; minority; obscure; outcome; pattern;
startling; subscribe; substantial; suspect; tinker; toolkit; vehicle.
sophisticated;
speculate;
Благоговейный страх; воздействие; появляться; вычислять; информация;
доступность; ересь; кругозор; ремесленник; меньшинство; набор инструментов;
непонятный; узор; подозревать; подписываться; поток; размышлять;
результат; среда общения; средство выражения и распространения
(мыслей); существенный; прибавлять; усиливать; потрясающий; уполномочивать;
увеличивать; усложненный; устройство; хрупкий; всегда имеющий
свое особое мнение человек.
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Unit 2
THE FUTURE OF COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
I. Read aloud the following words and expressions, give their meanings:
Focus, dedicate, patriarch, domain, tangible, pivotal, evolve, transistor, circuit,
vast, significant, deception, burden, scenario.
II. Read the text and answer the questions following it:
Let us focus on the ideas of a few of the people who have been instrumental in
creating yesterday's, today's, and tomorrow's human-computer technology. Several
key figures in the history of computation lived and died centuries or decades ago.
We call these people, renowned in scientific circles but less known to the public,
the patriarchs. Other co-creators of personal computer technology are still at work
today, continuing to explore the frontiers of mind-machine interaction. I call them
the pioneers.
The youngest generation, the ones who are exploring the cognitive domains we
will all soon experience, we call the Infonauts. It is too early to tell what history
will think of the newer ideas, but we're going to take a look at some of the things
the latest inner-space explorers are thinking, in hopes of catching some clues to
what (and how) everybody will be thinking in the near future.
As we shall see, the future limits of this technology are not in the hardware but
in our minds. The digital computer is based upon a theoretical discovery known
as "the universal machine" which is not actually a tangible device but a
mathematical description of a machine capable of simulating the actions of any
other machine. Once you have created a general-purpose machine that can imitate
any other machine, the future development of the tool depends only on what tasks
you can think to do with it. For the immediate future, the issue of whether machines can
become intelligent is less important than learning to deal with a device that can
become whatever we clearly imagine it to be.
The pivotal difference between today's personal computers and tomorrow's
intelligent devices will have less to do with their hardware than their software —
the instructions people create to control the operations of the computing
machinery. A program is what tells the general-purpose machine to imitate a
specific kind of machine. Just as the hardware basis for computing has evolved
from relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits, the programs have
evolved as well. When information processing grows into knowledge
processing, the true personal computer will reach beyond hardware and connect
with a vaster source of power than that of electronic micro circuitry — the
power of human minds working in concert.
The nature of the world we create in the closing years of the twentieth century will
be determined to a significant degree by our attitudes toward this new category of
tool. Many of us who were educated in the pre-computer era shall be learning new
skills. The college class of 1999 is already on its way. It is important that we realize
today that those skills of tomorrow will have little to do with how to operate
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computers and a great deal to do with how to use augmented intellects, enhanced
communications, and amplified imaginations.
Forget about "computer literacy" or obfuscating technical jargon, for these
aberrations will disappear when the machines and their programs grow more
intelligent. The reason for building a personal computer in the first place was to enable
people to do what people do best by using machines to do what machines do best. Many
people are afraid of
today's computers because they have been told that these
machines are smarter than they are — a deception that is reinforced by the rituals that
novices have been forced to undergo in order to use computers. In fact, the burden
of communication should be on the machine. A computer that is difficult to use is a
computer that's too dumb to understand what you want.
If the predictions of some of the people in this book continue to be accurate, our
whole environment will suddenly take on a kind of intelligence of its own
sometime between now and the turn of the century. Fifteen years from now, there will
be a microchip in your telephone receiver with more computing power than all the
technology the Defense Department can buy today. All the written knowledge in the
world will be one of the items to be found in every schoolchild's pocket.
The computer of the twenty-first century will be everywhere, for better or for
worse, and a more appropriate prophet than Orwell for this eventuality might well
be Marshall McLuhan. If McLuhan was right about the medium being the message,
what will it mean when the entire environment becomes the medium? If such
development does occur as predicted, it will probably turn out differently from
even the wildest "computerized household" scenarios of the recent past.
The possibility of accurately predicting the social impact of any new technology
is questionable, to say the least. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was
impossible for average people or even the most knowledgeable scientists to
envision what life would be like for their grandchildren, who we now know would
sit down in front of little boxes and watch events happening at that moment on the
other side of the world.
Today, only a few people are thinking seriously about what to do with a living
room wall that can tell you anything you want to know, simulate anything you
want to see, connect you with any person or group of people you want to
communicate with, and even help you find out what it is when you aren't entirely
sure. In the 1990s it might be possible for people to "think as no human being has
ever thought" and for computers to "process data in a way not approached by
the information-handling machines we know today," as J.C.R. Licklider, one of
the most influential pioneers, predicted in 1960, a quarter of a century before the
hardware would begin to catch up with his ideas.
Questions to answer:
1. Whom do we call patriarchs?
2. Which people do we call pioneers?
3. Whom do we call the infonauts?
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