Lesson 7

Text 1

Yevgeny Valentinovich Kaspersky is a world expert in the field of

information security. Today he heads the global IT security company

Kaspersky Lab, which he established together with a group of colleagues in

1997. Kaspersky Lab now operates in almost 200 countries, with over 30

regional and country offices worldwide.

Yevgeny Kaspersky was born in 1965 in the southwestern Russian Black

Sea port of Novorossiysk. When he was at school he loved mathematics and

often won Mathematical contests. These early victories inspired him to

attend extracurricular classes in Advanced Mathematics and Physics at

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

In 1991, Evgeny joined the KAMI Information Technologies Center,

which traded in computers and other equipment. Here, he and a group of

his colleagues developed the Anti-Viral Toolkit Pro (AVP) project, which

became the prototype for Kaspersky Anti-Virus. International recognition

of the project arrived in 1994, when Kaspersky group presented AVP at

Hamburg University’s test lab. Kaspersky Anti-Virus demonstrated a higher

virus detection rate than the most popular antivirus programs at that time.

As the project became very popular more and more foreign firms wanted

to license unique expert know-how, and in 1997, Evgeny and his team

founded their own company — Kaspersky Lab. The company started

growing geographically: the first foreign representative office — Kaspersky

Labs UK, in Cambridge — opened in 1999. It was a significant milestone

in the company’s history.

In the 2000s the business developed rapidly. The year 2003 saw the

opening of one regional office after another all over the world — Germany,

France, Spain, Italy, Japan and China. In 2009 the company expanded

their business to Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Romania, the USA,

South Korea and Australia.

Text 2

Hovhannes (Ivan) Abgari Adamian was an Armenian engineer, the

author of more than 20 inventions. He showed the first experimental color

television in London in 1928. In fact it was the first demonstration of

tricolor principle.

In 1925 in Yerevan, Adamian designed “Eristavi”, a device which

transferred the color image on distance. The experiment was very simple:

Adamian projected a number of colour figures on the screen with the help

of his friends who were in the next door laboratory. The discovery made

a great impact on the development of television.

Now Adamian is recognized as one of the founders of color television.

Text 3

A waterbed, water mattress, or flotation mattress is a bed or mattress

filled with water. Waterbeds for medical therapies appeared in various

reports in the 19th century.

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein described therapeutic

waterbeds in his novels Beyond This Horizon (1942), Double Star (1956),

and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).

The modern version became an extremely popular consumer item in

the United States in the 1970s.

The modern waterbed was created by Charles Prior Hall in 1968, while

he was a design student at San Francisco State University in California.

Fellow SFSU students Paul Heckel and Evan Fawkes also contributed to

the concept. Hall originally wanted to make an innovative chair. His first

prototype was a vinyl bag with 300 pounds (136 kg) of cornstarch, but the

result was uncomfortable. Then he filled it with Jell-O, which tended to

decompose. Finally, he decided to design a bed.

Hall patented his waterbed, which he originally called “the pleasure

pit”, in 1971. He founded a manufacturing and sales company which

became the leading retailer of waterbeds in the U.S., in 30 stores.

Unfortunately, Hall was unable to defend his patents against multiple

competitors. Sales peaked in 1987. They accounted for 22% of the domestic

mattress industry.

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