Page 14 - 4130

difficult and the device was never finished. Babbage was not
deterred, and by then was on to his next brainstorm, which he called
the Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6
steam engines, would be more general purpose in nature because it
would be programmable, thanks to the punched card technology of
Jacquard. Babbage realized that punched paper could be employed as
a storage mechanism, holding computed numbers for future
reference. He called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine the
Store and the Mill. In a modern computer these parts are called the
memory unit and the CPU. The Analytic Engine also had a key
function that distinguishes computers from calculators: the
conditional statement.
The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S.
Constitution states that a census should be taken of all U.S. citizens
every 10 years in order to determine the representation of the states
in Congress. While the very first census of 1790 had only required 9
months, by 1880 the U.S. population had grown so much that the
count for the 1880 census took 7.5 years. Automation was clearly
needed for the next census. The census bureau offered a prize for an
inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize was won by
Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted
Jacquards punched cards for the purpose of computation.
Hollerith’s invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a
card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven
mechanism which could count, and a large wall of dial indicators to
display the results of the count. Hollerith’s technique was successful
and the 1890 census was completed in only 3 years at a savings of 5
million dollars. Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine
Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became
International Business Machines, known today as IBM.

Task 3. Do you remember the English equivalents of the
following words and word combinations?

12