On-line exercise. 'Computers: From the Past to the Present'

Here are the answers for the first practice:

1. the device used in China as a calculating machine, 4000 years ago.
   This is the Abacus, which was first precursor to the adding machines.

2. the first mechanical calculator .
     It is the Pascaline and it worked as an adder.

3. the scientist considered the "father of computing".
   Charles Babbage gained this nickname for his contributions to the development of the computer

4. the machine used by H. Hollerith in 1890 to read the US census.
   This is the tabulating machinge, and this invention was the beginning for the big company IBM.

5. the computer developed by Konrad Zuse in 1941
   The Z3 is the machine invented by him, and it was the first machine to work on the binary system.

6. the digital computer built by engineers at IBM and H. Aiken in 1950
   This is the Mark I  and it was able to perform all four arithmetic operations.

7. the device designed by Alan Turing to perform logical operations
   It is the Turing Machine, but this is not a phisical devices, it is an hypothetical device used to solve logical operations.

8. the giant machine which had more than 2,000 vacuum tubes
   This is the ENIAC.

9. the company that designed the first microprocessor in 1971
   Intel was the first company who released a microprocessor.

10. the creators of Microsoft
   They were William Gates and Paul Allen.

11. the first computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse
   The first generations of machines with Macintosh were the first computers to have these revolutionaries peripherals.

12. the main uses of the Web and where it was developed
   It was developed at CERN in Switzerland and the uses can be very different but the usual things people do is looking up for information, shopping staff, downloading pictures, music or games, interact with other people and a numberless amount of things.

Linux

Since I am a computer science student, I am very related to the linux world and I can say that this operating system, or rather, every distribution is a great alternative to the most commercial systems like Windows or Macintosh, mainly because of the cost; they usually can be downloaded for free, and there are a lot of application developed which are under free lincenses and can be shared without any trouble.

The main problem when switching to linux for begginers is that this system is a little more complex so it is required to search for information and tutorials, and spend some time trying to understand the main differences with other systems, but this is not a problem, because in internet there exists a big amount of pages which have guides, tutorials, and answers to any kind of question.

Every day linux is getting more adepts, because it can be found distributions that are focus to specific fields, for example, administration, games, security, medicine... and maybe this OS becomes the system of the future.

Uninstall Silverlight.

The differences about uninstalling Silverlight on Windows XP or Vista are not great. Since Vista inherits most of its functions from XP both of them have a control panel, where several configuration options can be found, including the uninstalling programs option, but here they are a bit different because Vista adds another layout called "Control Panel Home" in which the options are grouped according to the functions they make.

In Mac OSX the steps to follow in order to uninstall Silverlight are very different. Instead of going to a control panel through a Start button, we search the silverlight plug-in into the hard drive where we previouly install it, and when we find it, there is not an uninstallation process as in Windows there is, all we have to do is select the file, send it to the trash and then clean the trash.

Publisher

I think this software is a great alternative when we want to make original letters because with it we have a lot of freedom with our designs. We can add text boxes and Images and we are able to manipulate them as we want.

In publisher we can design almost any kind of idea that can be printed in paper, for instance, newsletter, brochures, certifiates and more, it is just having the idea and publisher give us the tools.

The peculiarity that makes publisher so flexible it is that every element is considered as an independent object, so we can modify, for example, a text box, changing its text font and its text color and these modifications won't affect the other text boxes.

One of the things I like the most it is that we don't need to be an expert o a great publicist in order to create a brochure for our business; if we needed it sometime, we could use predesigned publications, and it would be very easy to make it ourselves.