Лекция: Ex. 16. Read and translate TEXT A.

BABBAGE'S DREAM COME TRUE

Part I (The Harvard Mark I)

A hundred years passed before a machine like the one Babbage devised was actually built. This occurred in 1944, when the American mathematician Howard Aiken of Harvard University and a group of IBM engineers completed the Harvard Mark I computer. This calculating machine could perform any selected sequence of four arithmetical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) on numbers up to 23 digits long without human intervention.

The machine was huge: it was more than 15 meters long and 2.4 m high, it weighed 35 tons, contained about 800 km of wire and about 750,000 separate parts. (See Figure 1)Its 78 adding machines and calculators were controlled by mechanical and electrical devices.

Figure 1