Give the summary of the text using the key terms.

1950s - PRESENT DAY: DECADE BY DECADE GUIDE

Read the following words and word combinations and use them for understanding and translation of the text:

establishment - создание, установление, учреждение, ос-нование

viable - жизнеспособный. конкурентный

rotating magnetic drum - вращающийся магнитный ба-рабан

advent – появление

ceramic substrate - керамическая подложка

assembly process - процесс сборки

versatile - разносторонний, подвижный, изменчивый

compatibility - совместимость

promulgation - распространение

mainstream – господствующая тенденция

developer’s kits - комплекты (наборы) разработчика

plug-in chips - чипы программного расширения

expansion bus - шина расширения

kernel – ядро

shell - оболочка

utility program – обслуживающая программа, утилита

competitor – конкурент, участник рынка

to mature – созреть, возмужать

to supplant – вытеснять

belatedly - с запозданием

to plunge - погружать

to vow – клясться, давать обет

seamlessly - легко, беспрепятственно, без проблем

freeware – свободно распространяемое ПО

clock rate - тактовая частота

The 1950s saw the establishment of a small but viable commercial computer industry in the United States and parts of Europe. Eckert and Mauchly formed a company to design and market the UNIVAC. This new generation of computers would incorporate the key concept of the stored program.

The UNIVAC became a hit with the public when it was used to correctly predict the outcome of the 1952 presidential election. Forty UNIVACs were eventually built and sold to such customers as the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Army and Air Force, and insurance companies. Several companies had some success in selling computers, but it was IBM that eventually captured the broad business market for mainframe computers.

The 1960s saw the advent of a “solid state” computer design featuring transistors in place of vacuum tubes and the use of ferrite magnetic core memory. These innovations made computers both more compact, more reliable, and less expensive to operate (due to lower power consumption.) There was a natural tendency to increase the capacity of computers by adding more transistors. As the decade progressed, however, the concept of the integrated circuit began to be implemented in computing. The first step in that direction was to attach a number of transistors and other components to a ceramic substrate, creating modules that could be handled and wired more easily during the assembly process.

IBM applied this technology to create what would become one of the most versatile and successful lines in the history of computing, the IBM System/360 computer. This was actually a series of 14 models that offered successively greater memory capacity and processing speed while maintaining compatibility so that programs developed on a smaller, cheaper model would also run on the more expensive machines.

By the mid-1960s, however, a new market segment had come into being: the minicomputer, pioneered by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Architecturally, the mini usually had a shorter data word length than the mainframe, and used indirect addressing for flexibility in accessing memory. Minis were practical for uses in offices and research labs that could not afford a mainframe.

In programming, the main innovation of the 1960s was the promulgation of the first widely-used, high-level programming languages, COBOL (for business) and FORTRAN (for scientific and engineering calculations.) The new higher-level languages made it easier for professionals outside the computer field to learn to program and made the programs themselves more readable, and thus easier to maintain. The invention of the compiler was yet another fruit of the stored program concept.

The 1970s saw minis becoming more powerful and versatile. Meanwhile, at the high end, Seymour Cray left CDC to form Cray Research, a company that would produce the world’s fastest supercomputer, the compact, freon-cooled Cray-1. In the mainframe mainstream, IBM’s 370 series maintained that company’s dominant market share in business computing.

The most striking innovation of the decade, however, was the microcomputer. The microcomputer combined three basic ideas: an integrated circuit so compact that it could be laid on a single silicon chip, the design of that circuit to perform the essential addressing and arithmetic functions required for a computer, and the use of microcode to embody the fundamental instructions. Intel’s 4004 introduced in late 1971 was originally designed to sell to a calculator company. When that deal fell through, Intel started distributing the microprocessors in developer’s kits to encourage innovators to design computers around them.

Word of the microprocessor spread through the electronic hobbyist community, being given a boost by the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that featured the Altair computer kit, available from an Albuquerque company called MITS for about $400.

The Altair was hard to build and had very limited memory, but it was soon joined by companies that designed and marketed ready-to-use microcomputer systems, which soon became known as personal computers (PCs). By 1980, entries in the field included Apple (Apple II), Commodore (Pet), and Radio Shack (TRS-80). These computers shared certain common features: a microprocessor, memory in the form of plug-in chips, read-only memory chips containing a rudimentary operating system and a version of the BASIC language, and an expansion bus to which users could connect peripherals such as disk drives or printers.

Meanwhile, programming and the art of software development did not stand still. Innovations of the 1970s included the philosophy of structured programming. New languages such as Pascal and C supported structured programming design to varying degrees. Programmers on college campuses also had access to UNIX, a powerful operating system containing a relatively simple kernel, a shell for interaction with users, and a growing variety of utility programs that could be connected together to solve data processing problems. It was in this environment that the government-funded ARPANET developed protocols for communicating between computers and allowing remote operation of programs. Along with this came e-mail, the sharing of information in newsgroups (Usenet), and a growing web of links between networks that would eventually become the Internet.

In the 1980s, the personal computer came of age. IBM broke from its methodical corporate culture and allowed a design team to come up with a PC that featured an open, expandable architecture. Other companies such as Compaq legally created compatible systems (called “clones”), and “PC-compatible” machines became the industry standard. Under the leadership of Bill Gates, Microsoft gained control of the operating system market and also became the dominant competitor in applications software (particularly office software suites).

Although unable to gain market share comparable to the PC and its clones, Apple’s innovative Macintosh, introduced in 1984, adapted research from the Xerox PARC laboratory in user interface design. At a time when PC compatibles were still using Microsoft’s text-based MS-DOS, the Mac sported a graphical user interface featuring icons, menus, and buttons, controlled by a mouse. Microsoft responded by developing the broadly similar Windows operating environment, which started out slowly but had become competitive with Apple’s by the end of the decade.

The 1980s also saw great growth in networking. University computers running UNIX were increasingly linked through what was becoming the Internet, while office computers increasingly used local area networks (LANs) such as those based on Novell’s Netware system. Meanwhile, PCs were also being equipped with modems, enabling users to dial up a growing number of on-line services.

In the programming field a new paradigm, object-oriented programming (OOP) was offered by languages such as Smalltalk and C++, a variant of the popular C language. The federal government adopted the Ada language with its ability to precisely manage program structure and data operations.

By the 1990s, the PC was a mature technology dominated by Microsoft’s Windows operating system. UNIX, too, had matured and become the system of choice for university computing and the worldwide Internet, which, at the beginning of the decade was far from friendly for the average consumer user.

This changed when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at Geneva’s CERN physics lab, adapted hypertext (a way to link documents together) with the Internet protocol to implement the World Wide Web. By 1994, Web browsing software that could display graphics and play sounds was available for Windows-based and other computers.

In the office, the Intranet (a LAN based on the Internet TCP/IP protocol) began to supplant earlier networking schemes. Belatedly recognizing the threat and potential posed by the Internet, Bill Gates plunged Microsoft into the Web server market, included the free Internet Explorer browser with Windows, and vowed that all Microsoft programs would work seamlessly with the Internet.

Moore’s Law, the dictum that computer power roughly doubles every 18 months, continued to hold true as PCs went from clock rates of a few tens of mHz to more than 1 gHz.