How Do The Computer Work ===> " H-Team

Active

1.      Back in the 1940s, Thomas Watson,boss of the giant IBM Corporation, reputedly forecast that the world would need no more than "about five computers."

2.      The beauty of a computer is that it can run a word-processing program one minute and then a photo-editing program five seconds later.

3.      the global population of computers has now risen to something like one billion machines.

4.      she goes to her letterbox and finds a pile of new math problems waiting forher attention.

5.      she takes a letter off the top of the pile, studies the problem, works out the solution, and scribbles the answer on the back. She puts this in an envelope addressed to the person who sent her the original problem and sticks it in her out tray,ready to post.

6.      from helping you to edit a photograph you've taken with a digital camera to displaying a web page, involves manipulating numbers in one wayor another.

7.      The hardware is what makes your computer powerful; the ability to run different software is what makes it flexible.

8.      Every one of these programs does different things, but they also do quite a lot of similar things too.

9.      they all need to be able to read the keys pressed down on the keyboard, store things in memory and retrieve them, and display characters (or pictures) on the screen.

10.  The operating system that definitively made this breakthrough was, of course, Microsoft Windows, written by Bill Gates.

Passive

1.      they were giant scientific and military behemoths commissioned by the government at a cost of millions of dollars apiece.

2.      they are embedded in everything from microwave ovens to cellphones and digital radios.

3.      You probably know that the photo is made up of millions of individual pixels (colored squares) arranged in a grid pattern.

4.      The BIOS is not, strictly speaking, software: it's a program semi-permanently stored into one of the computer's main chips, so it's known as firmware (it is usually designed so it can be updated occasionally, however).

5.      although we don't really think of it this way, the computer can be reprogrammed as many times as you like.

6.      Suppose you're back in the late 1970s, before off-the-shelf computer programs have really been invented.