Charles Babbage was truly a man ahead of his time.

UNIT 1

Analog computers are the most modern ones nowadays.

I can’t agree with this statement. Actually there was a great discussion concerning analog and digital computers in the middle of the 20 century. Nowadays it is clear that digital computers have considerable advantages. They dominate the computing world due to their great scalability, economics and power. Digital computers are used in all spheres of science and engineering as they can deal with large scale computation.

Digital computers are the most modern ones nowadays.

I fully agree with this statement. Далее 1.

The evolution of digital computing is often divided into generations.

This statement is absolutely true. The history of computer technology is divided into generations according to the dramatic improvements introduced into computational science, internal organization and programming languages. In accordance with these generations the following history of computing has been organized. It includes 7 stages named by the generations that dominated during that period. Namely they are: the mechanical era that lasted from the17th century till the Second World War end, the1-6 generation that is still in progress. So we can say that we live in the 7^th computing era.

The evolution of digital computing is not divided into generations.

I can’t agree. I’m afraid you’re wrong. Далее 3

Calculators are useless devices.

On the whole I think that you are wrong. Calculators are necessary for performing simple calculations for different house-hold activities. Their advantages are evident: they are cheap, portable and easy to use. But there I think it is necessary to mention not only the calculators themselves. Nowadays they exist as a part of modern cell-phones. And these phones in turn can successfully replace computers in many cases. (The cell-phone technology is developing at a very rapid pace.) During the last decade they have turned into smart phones, communicators and finally pocket computers. At the technology advances such devices become more and more available. Nevertheless I should mention that such machines cannot compete with powerful computers in handling great masses of information.

Charles Babbage was truly a man ahead of his time.

Yes, I fully agree with this statement. Charles Babbage was truly a man ahead of his time: many historians think the major reason he was unable to complete his projects was the fact that technology of the day wasn’t reliable enough. In spite of never building a complete working machine, Babbage with his colleagues recognized several important programming techniques, including conditional branches, interactive loops and index variables.

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