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  Narrative Writing on Computers - Draft One

Link to the Home Page of the Hong Kong  Polytechnic University

Ray, Ben, John, Steven,Wilfred & Lau Hoi Kit

Computers, in today changes ( use present perfet tense ) our life style a lot, and we would like to the investigate (article) development of computers.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal devised the first computer in 1642. It employed a series of ten-toothed wheels to add the numbers. In 1670, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz improved it to do multiplication. Then a French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard used wooden boards to control the weaving of complicated designs.(?? Weaving - on a computer ??) During 1880s, the American statistician Herman Hollerith employed a system that passed punched cards over electrical contacts for processing data.

In the early 19th Century, the British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage invented the first computer, it was called Different (Different or Difference?) Engine in order to handle complicated mathematical problems. After a period of time, the British mathematician Augusta Ada Byron (the daughter of the English poet Lord Byron) invented the Analytical Engine, which is similar to the modern digital computer. It had an input stream, storage, and output stream.

In the 20th century, analog computers were built, which could only calculate by moving and rotating the gears but it could not use (use a passive or delete 'use to') to solve Numerical approximations of equations. During both world wars, analog computing systems were used in (article) military. In the 1940s, Howard Aiken, a Harvard University mathematician, built the first digital computer. The function of this machine is to add numbers. A computer with program storage was built, based on the concepts of the mathematician John von Neumann.

In 1946, the first general purpose was invented in the University of Pennsylvania, and this stage of computer is going (use a past tense) to the electronic computer stage. With (By )using the 19,000 vacuum tubes, the machine can perform several hundred multiplications per minute. In (article) late 1950s, the use of (article) transistor (singular or plural?) , its (what does 'its' refer to ?) size is smaller and fast (fast or faster?) processing, using less power and longest life (how can processing have longest life?), and components became smaller, and did (no 'did' - the main verb in this sentence is 'became) intercomponent spacings and the system became much less expensively (adverb or adjective?)to build.

Integrated circuit (IC) (singular or plural?) was introduced in late 1960. It has many transistors fabricated on one silicon substrate. In mid-1970s, the development of large scale integrated circuit (LSI) (singular or plural?)and later very large scale integrated circuit (singular or plural?) (VLSI) lead to the introduction of microprocessor. Also, at that time, ‘switch-checking’ was made possible. Later, computers could increasing (increse what?) by handle larger number of bits at a time and large size of instruction sets.

One future development of computer is microminiaturization. Its purpose is to compress more and more circuit elements in a smaller space. We (who is 'we'?) are trying to use superconductivity and reduce electrical resistance to speed up the circuit. The aim of fifth-generation computer is to create Artificial Intelligence. One of the ways is to use parallel-processing computer to perform several task at the same time.

Teacher's comment: Your organisation and development of ideas is good. You need to pay more attention to your grammar and referencing.

You need to look at sentence structure. Don’t make lists of unrelated things in one sentence. You also need to be careful of singular and plurals to refer to things in general; eg. ‘Integrated circuits were introduced…’

The instructions for the assignment say to use referencing, but you haven’t said where you found this information. In your assignments you must have a bibliography, and say in each paragraph where you found the information, or you will fail due to plagiarism.

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Last updated on: Friday, December 14, 2001.