文献翻译——微机发展简史.doc

外文文献资料
Wireless works
The first stored puters began to work around 1950. The one we built in Cambridge, the EDSAC was first used in the summer of 1949.
These early puters were built by people like myself with varying backgrounds. We all had extensive experience in electronic engineering and were confident that that experience would stand us in good stead. This proved true, although we had some new things to learn. The most important of these was that transients must be treated correctly; what would cause a harmless flash on the screen of a television set could lead to a serious error in puter.
As far puting circuits were concerned, we found ourselves with an embarass de richess. For example, we could use vacuum tube diodes for gates as we did in the EDSAC or pentodes with control signals on both grids, a system widely used elsewhere. This sort of choice persisted and the term families of logic came into use. Those who have worked in puter field will remember TTL, ECL and CMOS. Of these, CMOS has now e dominant.
In those early years, the IEE was still dominated by power engineering and we had to fight a number of major battles in order to get radio engineering along with the rapidly developing subject of in the IEE light current electrical recognised as an activity in its own right. I remember that we had some difficulty anising a conference because the power engineers’ ways of doing things were not our ways. A minor source of irritation was that all IEE published papers were expected to start with a lengthy statement of earlier practice, something difficult to do when there was no earlier practice
Consolidation in the 1960s
By the late 50s or early 1960s, the heroic pioneering stage was over and puter field was starting up in real earnest. The number puters in the world had increased and they were much more reliable than the very early ones . To those years we can ascribe the first steps in high level languages and the