计算机专业英第三版 Unit 1.pptVIP

Unit One History of the Computer Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC Training target: In this part, our target is to train your reading comprehension. We have made the flexible sentences strong black and marked the subject, predicate and have object of them. Try to grasp the main idea of these sentences. Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC Electronic computer was one of the greatest inventions in the 20th century. Once talking about computer, we have to think of the birth of ENIAC(Electric Numerical Integrator And Calculator)( Pic 1.1). Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC The start of World War II produced a large need for computer capacity, especially for the military. New weapons were made for which trajectory tables and other essential data were needed. In 1946, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC. The size of ENIAC’s numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was therefore about 1,000 times faster then the previous generation of relay computers. Passage One The Introduction of ENIAC ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, weighed 30 tons and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (0.0002 seconds) read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate “units” of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a “route” for the flow of information. ENIAC was commonly accepted as the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and had been use