计算机发展史（计算机英语）.docVIP

计算机发展 In 1959, engineers at Texas Instruments showed that it was possible to incorporate many transistors, connected by metal tracks, onto one piece of silicon. This innovation became know as an integrated circuit, or “silicon chip”, and the trend ever since is summarized in “Moore’s Law”: the number of transitors that can be put on a chip doubles every 12 to 18 months, Gorden Moore, who formulated this law in 1965, later cofounded the chip manufacturer Intel.Intergrated circuits soon led to the development of yet smaller, cheaper computers, called minicompuers. Although still too expensive for most individuals to afford, these were relatively simple to operate. Other innovations of the 1960s were keyborads for inputting data into computers and monitors for displaying this data and the results of calculations before they were printed out. In 1971, the floppy disk was introduced for data storage.Microprocessors and MicrocomputersAlthough integrated circuits made computers smaller, the processing units still consisted of a number of circuits on separate chips. In 1971, an engineer working for Intel realized that a set of circuit commissioned for an electric calculator could all be put onto one chip and that the resulting device could be used as a general purpose “computer on a chip”. The result was the Intel 4004-the world’s first microprocessor. Physically, it consisted of a silicon chip in a protective ceramic capsule, with a set of metal pins sticking out that connected it to other components in whatever device it controlled. It contained 2,300 transistors, executed 60,000 operations per second, and could be used for any device-including computers and robots-that required a “brain” for accepting input and following a program of instructions to produce an output. Within five years, many very powerful imcrocomputer, or personal computer(PC)-an affordable machine for the masses. The first PCs, in kit form, appeared in the mid-1970s, and by the mid-1980s machines su