英语阅读：053《经济学家》读译参考之五十三：PC之梦－个人电脑问世25周年纪念.docVIP

TEXT 53 The dream of the personal computer PC之梦（陈继龙 编译） Jul 27th 2006 From The Economist print edition NOT many 25-year-olds can reasonably claim to have changed the world. The IBM personal computer, which was launched in 1981 and celebrates its 25th birthday in August, is a rare e_______①. Other personal computers had been launched before; but it was the IBM PC that ended up defining the standard around which a vast new industry then coalesced[1]. IBM, the titan of the computing world at the time, quickly lost control of its own creation, allowing others to reap the benefits.（1） But leave aside what the PC has done for the fortunes of particular companies, and instead step back and consider what the PC has done for mankind. 没有多少25岁的人或者公司可以理智地断言自己改变了这个世界。IBM个人电脑（PC）是个特例，它1981年投放市场，今年8月将迎来25周年庆。早前也有其它的PC投放市场，但最终确立PC标准的则是IBM，随后这一标准便成为一个庞大的新产业结合点。作为当时计算机领域的巨头，IBM很快就对自己的成果失去了控制，使得其它公司从中受益。但是，我们姑且不论PC给个别公司所带来的财富，先退一步想想PC为人类所做的贡献。 The PCs most obvious achievement has been to help make computers cheaper, more widely available and more useful than ever before. Before it appeared, different computers from different m________② were mostly incompatible with each other. （2）The PCs architecture was not perfect, but its adoption as an industry standard made possible economies of scale in both hardware and software. This in turn reduced prices and enabled the PC to democratise computing. PC最显著的成就在于使得计算机比以前更便宜、更普及、更有用了。在PC面世之前，不同生产商制造的不同计算机大都互不兼容。PC的结构设计并不完美，但作为一种产业标准，它的采用让软硬件方面的规模经济成为可能，从而也降低了价格，使得PC可以实现计算机大众化。 It is also worth celebrating the innovation that has been unleashed[2] by the PC. Its flexible, general-purpose architecture has made it the platform on which new technologies, from voice-over-internet calling to peer-to-peer file-sharing, have been incubated. Most important of all, the PC has, in the past decade, turned primarily into a communications device, thanks to the rise of the internet. （3）Cheap, fast global communication, online commerce, the ability to find the a