Computers

Dear Marcus

My first week of March reading text is about the computers and users, in some poor, moderate and rich country, it is interesting to say which computers’ population users and speed of the Internet become the main evidence to assess a country and its people are advanced, at the development or back warded. Yes its imagine but true as we are leaving in the speed world and only strongest in the economy, Information Technology (IT), and new technology will win the competition hence they can leave more comfortable. I believe that computers never can govern to the human as they don’t have mind and sense, they are only high technology machines that have been generated and developed by scientists to easy the work and life. Following are the responses to the text questions:

1) The first time that I used computer was 1990s in the Polytechnic University, while I was a mechanical engineering student, at that time we used punch card to load our program in the computer; it was a hard work and any mistake in the punching cause to wrong hole in the card then computer get error from the program and it did’t run. Our university is one of the first centres in Iran that used computers to register the students,planing courses and classes, getting courses and the computer PhD teaching the students how to write a program in some computer languages such as FORTRAN, Pascal and later C++ them how to run it, but for the large program you need too many cards as each program line had been punching in one card only at the maximum 220 characters.

2) Yes off course, some body buy a limited user name and password card from shopping for one, two or ten hours usage and connect through the Internet by using this user name and password. Nominal speed for such service is 52kbs but normally speed is lower than it, specially in the evening. somebody use the Internet in the popular cafes that also some times slow and fee is about 0.5$ and above. You can install an ADSL as well for high speed 100Mbs but it is nominal speed too, as Iran Internet connection is by axial cable in most places, the government are going to replace the axial cable by light fiber cable to get more speed and connectors. Another reason is that in Iran Internet is filtering due to some political reason and prevents hacker attack also pornography.
Most of the people in Iran have PC at home or laptop, in the famous Universities and research centre the high speed Internet is available but only for the Master of Science students, PHD and researcher. This Internet is not through the cable but they have a dish without any filtration and directly connect to the web from the satellite.

Computer word and IT is on the great development and nobody knows what the end of this new technology is, but you can guess, look at the photo for the new pen pocket computer! We have to say goodbye laptop!! Remember that NASA always has at least two models higher than commercial computers that we used for example when we are using series five of computers, NASA has series seven or upper!!! I can’t image how much is the speed of their computer and how does it work, anybody knows please inform us.

Regards,

Farzad