TRANSCRIPTS
diplomacy and war. While this is the first time we find a link between computers and codes, it is not the last.
Unit 5, Lesson 2, Exercise E≤1.22
Part 3 Anyway, er … to return to our story of the computer – we are now almost at the start of the 20th century, and the next important invention came from Herman Hollerith in the USA. He developed the Tabulating Machine to speed up the processing of information from the US Census, or population count. It used a combination of punched cards and mechanical gears, and it was very successful, reducing the time needed for data processing from eight years for the 1880 Census, to one year for the 1890 Census. Hollerith went on to develop more complex machines and started his own company which leased machines to governments and commercial organizations all around the world. The company which he founded eventually went on to become IBM, International Business Machines, which played a major role in the development of the modern computer.
Other developments were also taking place, which were more academic than commercial. Machines for calculating differential equations had been in use for some time. However, the Differential Analyzer, built in 1932 by a scientist called Bush from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, was much more powerful and could perform large numbers of calculations much more quickly. The calculations were carried out using different sets of gears, making it an analogue device, similar to those designed by Babbage. However, it used electrical motors and, unlike Babbage’s engines, it was not programmable and needed to be ‘hard wired’, that is, set up specifically for each new differential equation. The machine was successfully used during the Second World War to calculate the paths of missiles.
The Second World War also saw the creation of a machine which can be truly said to mark the start of the modern era of computing. This was a device called Colossus, developed by a British mathematician, Alan Turing, or T-U-R-I-N-G, in order to break German codes. It used electrical relays or valves to perform calculations and also to store some of the data while it was being processed. It was the first computer to do so, and because of this, it is regarded as the first electronic computer. Punched tape was used to input data
and was a very fast way of doing so. Unfortunately, the whole project was kept completely secret until the 1970s, which meant that many people were not properly recognized for their discoveries during their lifetimes, which was a great pity. Er… Where was I? Oh yes. Once the first Colossus proved successful, a number of others followed, and by the end of the war, ten were in operation. By modern standards, Colossus machines were very large and slow, but by allowing the British to read German military communications, the impact which they had on the war was enormous.
Unit 5, Lesson 3, Exercise B≤1.23
Part 4 Now, we have seen how important the role of computers was during the Second World War, but it was not long after the end of the war that the power of computing was turned towards business and administrative problems. The UNIVAC was the first American commercial computer. In addition, it was the first computer to be specifically designed for business rather than scientific purposes. Its calculations were performed using vacuum tubes and reading from magnetic tapes, a new technology which had been introduced for storing data. UNIVAC I used 5,200 vacuum tubes and weighed about 13 metric tons. It could perform around 2,000 operations per second. While vacuum tubes offered a significant advantage over mechanical computers, the technology was limited by cost, size and energy consumption in terms of how big computers could get. The development of the transistor by the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation in 1947 showed a way around those limitations. Transistors could be made much more quickly and cheaply using a very simple and widely available ingredient, sand. In fact silicon, which is obtained from sand, is the material from which all modern electronic components are made. Transistors also consumed very little power and were very small compared to vacuum tubes. Computers which contained transistors instead of vacuum tubes could be smaller and still deliver as much, or more, processing power. With the arrival of the transistor-based computer, the modern era of computing had truly arrived. However … oh, dear … sadly, I see that we’ve run out of time. This means that I’ll have to talk about the development of the Internet next time. In the meantime, I’d like you to do some research on what made it possible for the Internet to develop in the way it did. And
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