“How do the computers work” (Rainbow Troops)

From this article “How do the computers work” we can get active and passive voice

Passive Voices

1.      To be fair to Watson, computers have changed enormously in that time. In the 1940s, 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.      Taking in information is called input,storing information is better known as memory (or storage), chewing information isalso known as processing, and spitting out results is called output.

4.      Your computer's processor (sometimes known as the central processing unit) is a microchip buried deep inside.

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

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

7.      This is why programs are also called software.

8.      They're "soft" in the sense that they are not fixed: they can be changed easily.

9.      By contrast, a computer's hardware— the bits and pieces from which it is made (and the peripherals, like the mouse and printer, you plug into it)—is pretty much fixed when you buy it off the shelf.

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

11.  You can think of an operating system as the "foundations" of the software in a computer that other programs (called applications) are built on top of.

                                                            

12.  Unlike the operating system, which is the same from one computer to another, the BIOS does vary from machine to machine according to the precise hardware configuration and is usually written by the hardware manufacturer.

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

14.  it's a program semi-permanently stored into.

15.  called the BIOS.

16.  one of the computer's main chips, so it's known as firmware (it is usually designed so it can be updated occasionally, however).

Active Voices

1.      Each morning, she goes to her letterbox and finds a pile of new math problems waiting for her attention.

2.      She piles them up on her desk until she gets around to looking at them. Each afternoon, she takes a letter off the top of the pile, studies the problem, works out the solution, and scribbles the answer on the back.

3.      She goes to her letterbox and finds a pile of new math problems waiting for her attention.

4.      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.

5.      Then she moves to the next letter in the pile.

6.      Once you understand that computers are about input, memory, processing, and output, all the junk on your desk makes a lot more sense.

7.      If you use a microphone and voice recognition software, that's another form of input.

8.      Her brain is the processor that works out the solutions to the problems;

9.      You can see that your friend is working just like a computer.

10.  Your computer probably stores all your documents and files on a hard-drive: a huge magnetic memory.

11.  But smaller, computer-based devices like digital cameras and cellphones use other kinds of storage such as flash memory cards.

12.  Suppose you're looking at a digital photo you just taken in a paint or photo-editing program and you decide you want a mirror image of it (in other words, flip it from left to right).

13.  As you can read in our long article on computer history, the first computers were gigantic calculating machines and all they ever really did was "crunch numbers": solve lengthy, difficult, or tedious mathematical problems.

14.  Today, computers work ona much wider variety of problems—but they are all still, essentially, calculations.

15.  The computer stores each pixel as a number, so taking a digital photo is really like an instant, orderly exercise in painting by numbers!

16.  The computer then works through all the pixels, increasing the brightness value for each one by, say, 10 percent to make the entire image brighter.

17.  Writing the program usually took more time than doing whatever it was that you had originally wanted to do (writing the letter).

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

19.  All you have to do is slide the little "brightness" icon.

20.  Before you could write a letter on a computer, you had to write a program that would read the letters you typed on the keyboard, store them in the memory, and display them on the screen.

21.  People started selling programs like word processors to save you the need to write programs yourself.

22.  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.

23.  If you have a standard operating system and you tweak it so it will work on any machine, all you have to do is write applications that work on the operating system.