Exercise 2. Read the following texts and describe the ability of different things given in these texts

1. Thomas of Colmar (A.K.A. Charles Xavier Thomas) created the first successful mechanical calculator. The range of abilities of this calculator consisted of adding, subtraction, multiplication and division. A lot of improved desktop calculators by many inventors followed, so that by about 1890, the range of improvements included:

Accumulation of partial results

Storage and automatic reentry of past results (A memory function)

Printing of the results

Each of these required manual installation. These improvements were mainly made for commercial users, and not for the needs of science.

2. The 19^th Conference on Human Factors in Computing, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, drew nearly 3000 people. All came ready to talk about ways to help people make better use of what Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called “the most important machine in history”.

Already, $ 25000-and-up software from Troba Inc. of San Francisco lets Web sites determine, by analyzing patterns of movement among pages, whether online visitors are angry or confused. The refinement of Troba customers’ sites, mostly online relatives, is a reality now.

Microsoft will devote $ 4billion to research and development of input from handwriting, the human voice, and sensors that use body language and facial expression to infer the user’s intent.