【雅思听力】电脑的发展(2/2)

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HINTS
Alan Turning
Colossus I
ENIAC
Bell Labs
Integrated Circuit
During the war a British group, putting into practice some of the ideas of their brilliant countryman Alan Turning, built a computer called Colossus I that helped break German military codes. The British, German and US machines all shared a common characteristic. They were the first computers to use the binary system of numbers, the standard internal language of today's digital computers.
By the end of the war, computers were developing quickly. In 1946 the world's first value computer ENIAC was built. ENIAC vastly increased computer speed by using vacuum tubes rather than electromechanical relays as its switches, but it still had a major shortcoming. To perform different operations, it had to be manually rewired, like an old wire-and-plug telephone switchboard, a task that could take several days. In 1947 three scientists at Bell Labs invented a tiny, deceptively simple device called the transistor, short for transfer resistance. For a long time, however, computers were large and complicated machines that only governments and large companies could afford to operate. Then in the 1960s scientists developed the Integrated Circuit. From then on circuit designs could be printed on to a small piece of silicon chip. Computers could become much smaller and cheaper and thus available to everyone.
Today they are commonplace in business, schools and homes, in fact one in every six homes in Britain has a computer.