Lesson 10 Computers: advantages and disadvantages

1. Read and memorize the following words.

substitute – заміна, заміщення;

to convince – запевняти;

frightened – наляканий;

advanced – сучасний;

subscription – підписка;

horribly – жахливо;

spontaneous – невимушений;

to censore – перевірятися, підлягати цензурі.

2 Discuss and dramatize the following dialogue:

ANNA The thing is, Richard, CD-ROMs are actually much better than books.

RICHARD Why's that?

ANNA Well, you can store so much more information on the disks. I mean, not just stories, but you can have pictures from galleries, you can have say portraits from the Louvre in Paris or the National Gallery in London, there's so much...

RICHARD I have to disagree. I don't think anything will ever replace the book as a means of storing information in the way that you actually look through a book to find it, and when it comes to art, there's no substitute for the real thing. Nothing will replace a visit to Paris or London to see...

ANNA Of course not, but you can have it in your own home, can't you?

RICHARD I know, but people are always saying this. Every few years something comes along and everybody says. «Oh, this is the way of the future. This is going to replace...» I mean, a few years ago a friend convinced me that CD-ROMs would replace tapes and that hasn't happened yet.

ANNA No.

RICHARD You see, there’s nothing more convenient than a book, is there?

ANNA Well, I think you're a bit frightened of change, aren't you? I mean... I expect you've got a fax machine, haven’t you, but actually e-mail is far better because it’s much faster than a fax machine. And I bet you thought you'd never have anything as advanced as a fax machine, but...

RICHARD No, but yes. I use the fax, but I think E-mail is a rather expensive form of sending letters because you've got to pay the subscription to the company and everything, whereas...

ANNA Yeah...

RICHARD ...with a fax you're just paying for a simple phone call.

ANNA Yeah, I agree. And a fax is still a good way of sending visual information, such as drawings and diagrams. But, you know, a lot of people like to be... kind of... contacted by e-mail.

RICHARD Really?

ANNA Yeah. Oh yeah!

RICHARD I cant believe that.

ANNA It's quite a sociable thing, you know, because you can actually...

RICHARD think it’s much better to have a handwritten letter, surely?

ANNA Well...

RICHARD It sounds horribly cold to me.

ANNA Well, no... not really, because you can be quite sociable, you can... you know you can chat to people, rather than, you know... you send something, somebody sends something back, you know, you can do an add line here, an add line there. It’s good.

RICHARD No, I disagree. I don't think it’s very sociable to be contacted by E-mail and be talking to a computer screen. I mean, it’s like talking to a robot.

ANNA Well, I think it's good to be connected to e-mail, because it is a very spontaneous way of communicating with people all over the world.

RICHARD What about the Internet? I mean, you're a huge fan of that, at the moment, aren’t you?

ANNA Well. I am actually, I mean. I don't think it should be government controlled, because then, you know, you lose your freedom of speech, you lose...

RICHARD Well...

ANNA ... your rights, you know...

RICHARD I can see what you're saying, but I do believe there should be some control over the Internet, otherwise it could be used as a way of sending political propaganda, or pornography. There's a huge amount of pornography and it goes to anyone with a computer. I think that's wrong.

ANNA Yeah ... there are a lot of people that are afraid of being censored by the government...

3 Look at the chart and decide who is likely to hold these options, Anna or Richard, Put a tick () in the appropriate column.

	Richard	Аnna
CD-ROMS are much better than books because more information can be stored оn them.
Being connected to an e-mail system is very useful.
Most people like being contacted by e-mail.
To be contacted by e-mail is not very sociable.
The Internet should be controlled by the government.
Some people are now afraid of being censored by the government.
There's no point in being connected to TV stations around the world if you don’t speak the language.

4. Communicative situations

1. Computers in our everyday life: advantages and disadvantages.

2. Do you use a computer in your studies at the College?

3. Is it necessary for a contemporary person to know how the computer works?

4. In what cases is it more efficient to use a computer then to do the job without using it?

5. Can computers substitute teachers in school studies?

6. What possibilities will open to you while using computers?

7. You consult your friend about computers. What can you say?

8. You are at the conference. The theme of your report is Programming languages.

9. At the exam the professor asks you about the development of computers.

10.You're the head of a firm, producing computers. What can you say to advertise your product?

Самостійна робота

Computers: History and Development

Overview

Nothing epitomizes modern life better than the computer. For better or worse, computers have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Today computers do much more than simply compute: supermarket scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized telephone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication untangled; and automatic teller machines (ATM) let us conduct banking transactions from virtually anywhere in the world. But where did all this technology come from and where is it heading? To fully understand and appreciate the impact computers have on our lives and promises they hold for the future, it is important to understand their evolution.

A History of the Graphical User Interface

The graphical user interface now in use by every major operating system in the world has an intriguing history. First thought up in 1945 by Vanaver Bush in his "memex" computer, he envisioned a time when users would interact with a machine with a graphical interface. He later wrote a little about its design, but never really did anything with it. In the 50s though Douglas C. Engelbart took this idea and began to work on making it a reality. Working at a section of the Department of Defense called the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) he recruited several gifted computer scientists to design such a revolutionary machine. His team has many interesting ideas, and developed a couple notable products. The most notable of which was developed in 1963; a pointing device that had three buttons on one end and a cord one the other. Because the three buttons looked like eyes and a nose and the cord looked like a tail, the little pointing device was christened the "mouse".

Unfortunately, Engelbart eventually lost funding before he could finish his project. Most of the engineers working for Engelbart fled to a new facility at 3333 Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, California. Called the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) it was established in 1970 by Xerox Corporation. Not wanting to lose out on this new computer revolution Xerox had set the place up for use by the greatest geniuses in the computer industry at the time. They paid them simply to perform research pertaining to the field of computer science to eventually create new advancements in computers, regardless of price. Taking the visions of Engelbart, and their new visionaries like Larry Tesler and Alan Kay, these began work on a new type of computer. They decided that its operating system would do away with the arcane command-line interface and instead would emulate the simplicity of a user's desktop, where papers overlapped each other and were moved at will while actions were performed on them without complex commands to type. In only three years, their machine was created.

Apple adds the fuel to the PC revolution

Later that decade several "hackers" began meeting to discuss microcomputing at the Homebrew Computer Club, just minutes away from PARC. Larry Tesler of PARC attended some of these meetings and was appalled by their amazement of small graphics routines on the screen. How could they be so awed by such primitive computing? To everybody but PARC engineers what the club was showing was the future. Another person attending these meetings was Steve Wozniak. Not being able to afford the Altair 8080 systems on display, he began work on his own computer to show off, the Apple-1. After building the machine, founding Apple Computer with Steve Jobs, selling it with moderate success, and working with future Apple employees, he began work on the Apple II. Needless to say it became an instant success with its color display, Disk ][ drive, and other neat features. In 1979, Raskin, the 31st person to join Apple, began work on a small project that would encompass a $500 business machine code-named Macintosh. He was still intrigued by the Smalltalk, and tried convincing Jobs to take a tour of PARC, much to the disinterest of Jobs. It wasn't until Bill Atkinson, a resident Apple genius working on the graphics routines for another project called Lisa, also suggested he should go that Jobs began to become curious about what lay at the Xerox facility. After offering Xerox a chance to invest $1 million in Apple, which was enjoying exponential stock growth, Apple was allowed two visits to PARC to see Smalltalk and the Alto.

The unfortunate doom of the Lisa

His first visit was in November 1979 where he saw the future of personal computing in the Alto. He began to scream and shout how revolutionary it was, and brought a handful of Apple VP's and engineers a month later to check it out. Jobs later demanded that the Lisa incorporate the PARC technology. Bill Atkinson, working for the Lisa group, supped up LisaGraf, responsible for the machine's graphics routines. The Lisa project team members worked furiously for years. They decided to make a application bundle to be included with the computer, and to make it incompatible with the Mac. This would prove deadly for the Lisa project. The $9998 Lisa Office System was finally introduced on January 1983, ten years after the Xerox Alto was developed. Ten thousand dollars for a machine that was notoriously slow, had no third-party software, a black & white display, and was not compatible with any other computer was not a good investment people thought. Very few embraced the Lisa, and like the Alto it was inevitably doomed to failure.

Although much of the interface of both the Lisa and Mac was based heavily on the work done at PARC, and 15 of the engineers at Xerox later left to join Apple, much of the Mac and Lisa operating systems were already written before Job's visit to PARC. The Lisa team had added extra features not included in the Alto including the dragging, double-clicking of icons, pull-down menus, a menubar at the top, and the famous trash can. The Lisa OS also had preemptive multitasking. This and the fact that the Lisa team had no guide or set of instructions to follow, therefore having to "reinvent the wheel" according to what some of them had seen is reason enough to give them the full credit they deserve. See a Lisa OS 7/7 screen shot, or a color picture of the Lisa.

The Macintosh arrives to a skeptical audience

The Macintosh team decided to take a different approach. Following Raskin's lead and heavily motivated by Jobs, they kept the Mac small, cheap, and cost-effective. Jobs and the Mac team were persistent on "putting a dent on the universe" as the famous quote goes. They allowed third-party companies to develop applications for the Mac. They created the Mac Toolbox, to be set in the ROM. They gave several examples of how to create applications for the Mac and created the Macintosh Interface Guidelines, appropriately nicknamed the religion of the Mac programmer. They created the Finder, arguably one of the greatest applications ever for the machine. It seemed the Mac would be the next big thing, but it too had problems on its introduction. The Mac was too small, too inefficient. Its 128k of memory could barely support the memory it needed to perform the same routines the Lisa did with 10 times the memory. MacDraw (created by Atkinson) and MacWrite (created by Randy Wingginton), two of the applications bundled with the Mac. They were essentially too good. Mediocre software was practically forbidden for the Mac OS, and there were only so many excellent programmers willing to take the challenge. Even worse, the Mac was being perceived as a toy. Luckily, enough did to save the platform. After the introduction of the Mac 512k, Mac 512ke, and the Mac Plus, as well as applications like PageMaker, Word, Excel, and much evangelism by the Apple staff, companies began to take notice. "Desktop publishing" was born, and the Mac was ensured a place in computer history. Eventually, Mac style GUIs were even created for the Apple II series: MouseWorks for the IIc and GS/OS for the IIGS. See a conception screen shot of Mac OS System 1.0. See a screen shot of the GS/OS.

Apple and Microsoft declare war

Bill Gates also decided the GUI was the way to go during this time. After seeing that Apple refused to license the Mac OS, he announced Windows in 1983, and how it would revolutionize the PC industry. The first version of Windows would not be released for 4 more years. During the development of Windows, Bill Gates feared Apple would sue him due to the fact that his OS was looking a lot like the Mac OS. So on November 22, 1983, John Sculley, then CEO of Apple, signed an agreement to allow Microsoft use Mac OS technology in exchange for further development of Microsoft software for the Mac. This single event would be one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the microcomputing industry. Windows 1.01 was finally released for use with IBM computers and compatible clones on August 11, 1987. Its arcane interface, built on the cryptic MS-DOS operating system, was almost unusable. With its unsightly tiled windows and lack of icons, it was a large disappointment. Even so, Jobs began to complain about how Microsoft had stolen the Mac OS's interface design to which Bill Gates replied in the March 14, 1989 edition of MacWEEK:

"Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox's house before I did and took the TV doesn't mean I can't go in later and take the stereo"