I Answer the following questions:

1. Which company did Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs start in 1976?

2. What did the first computer use?

3. What did an American inventor called Ed Roberts made?

4. Who made the first Personal Computer in 1981?

5. What can modern computers do?

6. What is the idea of “Moore’s Law”?

II Complete the sentences:

1. In 1957, IBM made a computer called the ___________.

2. When you bought an Altair 8800, you got a ___________.

3. In 1977 second computer of the Apple Computer Company, ___________, appeared.

4. In 1974, Intel made the 8080, a better and faster chip with ___________.

5. The computer technician Gordon Moore made this prediction in 1965: “The number of ___________”.

III Put the sentences in the right order:

1. A modern PC is much faster than the very large and expensive computers from the 1970s.

2. An Altair 8800 cost less than 400$.

3. In 1978, the Apple Computer Company made 7 million dollars!

4. It was called a personal computer because it only need one personal to work it.

5. IBM made a computer called the 610 Auto-Point.

6. The Intel Pentium 4 chip, made in the year 2000, has 42 million transistors.

IV Translate the text

V Write the annotation to the text. Unit 6 Bill Gates and Microsoft

PCs are a very important part of life today, but in the 1970s most people did not know very much about them. One of the first people to see the future of the PC was Bill Gates; because of this, he is now one of the richest people in the world.

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, USA, in 1955. He began to study computer programming at school, when he was thirteen. Later, he went to Harvard University. While he was a student there, he and a friend, Paul Allen, wrote a computer program for a new personal computer, the Altair 8800. They showed it to Ed Roberts, the man who had invented the Altair 8800. Ed Roberts liked the software and agreed to use it. Gates and Allen left university early and started their own company – Microsoft.

Microsoft's first big success came in 1981. Apple computers were already very popular, and so the computer company IBM decided to start building PCs. They asked Bill Gates to write an Operating System for their PCs, and he wrote MS-DOS. It was not very easy to use, but it was still a big success.

In 1984, Apple made a new computer called a Macintosh. Bill Gates and Microsoft helped to write the Operating System for this computer. It was much easier to use than MS-DOS because it had pictures on the screen instead of difficult instructions. Later, Microsoft made their own Operating System which used pictures - they called it Windows. Windows became the most successful piece of software in the history of computing. By 1986, Bill Gates was already a billionaire at the age of thirty-one.

In the 1990s, Microsoft became even larger. In 1995, the new Operating System (Windows 95) came with a piece of software that let people use the Internet. Soon, millions of people were paying Microsoft twenty dollars a month to use the Internet.

Many people are unhappy about Microsoft because they think the company is too big and powerful. Most personal computers use the Windows Operating System, so people usually buy Microsoft software too. It is difficult for small software companies to show their programs to the public.

Recently, the Internet has given people a chance to find out about other kinds of software. Some programmers do not want money for their software - they just want to share ideas with other computer programmers. They call this kind of software 'shareware'. However, a lot of people are happy to pay money for the software which they use at home and in the office, so the future of Microsoft and other software companies is probably safe.

Tasks