Table A
a Edutainment
b Multimedia
с Expert system
d Telecommute
e Information superhighway
Table В
i Software that enables computers to 'think' like experts
ii Use computers to stay in touch with the office while working at home
iii Internet system designed to provide free, interactive access to vast resources for people all over the world
iv Multimedia materials with a combination of educational and entertainment content
v A combination of text with sound, video, animation, and graphics
2 Mark the following statements as True or False:
a Desktop organisers are programs that require desktop computers,
b Computers are sometimes used to monitor systems that previously needed human
supervision,
с Networking is a way of allowing otherwise incompatible systems to communicate and share resources,
d The use of computers prevents people from being creative,
e Computer users do not have much influence over the way that computing develops.
Text 2
I. Find the answers to these questions in the following text.
1. What did Linus Torvalds use to write the Linux kernel?
2. How was the Linux kernel first made available to the general public?
3. What is a programmer likely to do with source code?
4. Why will most software companies not sell you their source code?
5. What type of utilities and applications are provided in a Linux distribution?
6. What is X?
7. What graphical user interfaces are mentioned in the text?
LINUX
Linux has its roots in a student project. In 1992, an undergraduate called Linus Torvalds was studying computer science in Helsinki, Finland. Like most computer science courses, a big component of it was taught on (and about) Unix. Unix was the wonder operating system of the 1970s and 1980s: both a textbook example of the principles of operating system design, and sufficiently robust to be the standard OS in engineering and scientific computing. But Unix was a commercial product (licensed by AT&T to a number of resellers), and cost more than a student could pay.
Annoyed by the shortcomings of Minix (a compact Unix clone written as a teaching aid by Professor Andy Tannenbaum) Linus set out to write his own 'kernel' — the core of an operating system that handles memory allocation, talks to hardware devices, and makes sure everything keeps running. He used the GNU programming tools developed by Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation, an organisation of volunteers dedicated to fulfilling Stallman's ideal of making good software that anyone could use without paying. When he'd written a basic kernel, he released the source code to the Linux kernel on the Internet.
Source code is important. It's the original from which compiled programs are generated. If you don't have the source code to a program, you can't modify it to fix bugs or add new features. Most software companies won't sell you their source code, or will only do so for an eye-watering price, because they believe that if they make it available it will destroy their revenue stream.
What happened next was astounding, from the conventional, commercial software industry point of view - and utterly predictable to anyone who knew about the Free Software Foundation. Programmers (mostly academics and students) began using Linux. They found that it didn't do things they wanted it to do — so they fixed it. And where they improved it, they sent the improvements to Linus, who rolled them into the kernel. And Linux began to grow.
There's a term for this model of software development; it's called Open Source (see www.opensource.org/ for more information). Anyone can have the source code — it's free (in the sense of free speech, not free beer). Anyone can contribute to it. If you use it heavily you may want to extend or develop or fix bugs in it - and it is so easy to give your fixes back to the community that most people do so.
An operating system kernel on its own isn't a tot of use; but Linux was purposefully designed as a near-clone of Unix, and there is a lot of software out there that is free and was designed to compile on Linux. By about 1992, the first 'distributions' appeared.
A distribution is the Linux-user term for a complete operating system kit, complete with theutilities and applications you need to make itdo useful things — command interpreters, programming tools, text editors, typesetting; tools,and graphical user interfaces based on the X windowing system. X is a standard in academic and scientific computing, but not hitherto common on PCs; it's a complex distributed windowing system on which people
implement graphical interfaces like KDE and Gnome.
Asmore and more people got to know about Linux,some of them began to port the Linux kernelto run on non-standard computers. Because it's free, Linux is now the most widely-ported operating system there is.
II. Re-read the text to find the answers to these questions.
