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Case LearningMilestones of the personal computer industry in the 21st century“There have only been two milestone products in our industry to date,” Steve Jobstold the Boston Computing Club in 1984. “The first was Apple II in 1977 and thesecond was the IBM PC in 1981.”Jobs，at the time，was announcing the third breakthrough – the Apple Mac – whichturned 30 last week.Looking back over the four decades of the PC industry, Jobs’ claim that the AppleMac was the sector’s third milestone stands up to scrutiny, however the greatestmilestone of all for the PC was the launch of Window 3.0 in 1990.The rise of WindowsWindows 3.0 changed the business model of the industry, it established softwarevendors – particularly Microsoft – as being dominant over hardware manufacturers,that shift nearly killed Apple and eventually sent most PC builders to the wall.Microsoft’s advantage over Apple, IBM, Atari and dozens of other systems, wasthat users weren’t locked into one vendor’s products.The Windows 3.0 milestone was even more important in that it forced a shakeout inthe software industry as well, many of the incumbent vendors – most notablyWordPerfect – though the Windows Graphic User Interface (GUI) was a flash inthe pan and that most office workers would prefer to use keyboard instructionsrather than mouse clicks.WordPerfect was horribly, horribly wrong in judging the market and by the timethey released the Windows versions of their product Microsoft had captured keymarket share for Word and the bundled Office suite that dominates the businessworld today.Going mobileSo things were good for Microsoft until the next milestone, which again wasmarked by Steve Jobs, the launch of the iPhone genuinely did change thesmartphone industry and was the first inkling of mobile would eventuallydestabilize the PC sector.It’s interesting comparing Jobs’ iconic 2007 iPhone which sets the standard forproduct launches with the somewhat rough at the edges 1984 Boston presentationalthough both show how Steve Jobs was a master salesperson and a passionatebeliever in his products.The PC’s final milestoneThree years later Steve Jobs delivered the milestone product that marked thebeginning of the end for the PC industry, the iPad finally delivered a mobilecomputing device that businesses and consumers wanted.Apple’s iPad also marked a fundamental shift in the computer industry – no longerdid the software companies control the market, power had shifted back to the manufacturers.From that moment on the PC, and Microsoft’s Windows business, started a terminal decline.The rise and fall of the personal computer is a great illustration of the transition of technology. That Steve Jobs bookmarked the beginning and the end of the PC industry is an interesting note about a technology that changed the home and workplace.Microsoft edges towards the post PC era and the end of Windows Microsoft’s evolution to the post PC era has been a fascination of this blog for several years now as the company’s once flagship Windows becomes irrelevant in a world dominated by smartphones and tablet computers.The launch of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet were the great hope for the company, but it appears the business model that built Microsoft into one of the world’s biggest companies is doomed. Microsoft is shifting to the post-PC era where Windows has little role.Yesterday’s financial results emphasized the shift as the consumer licensing business fell 6% year against last year’s revenues while the company’s overall revenues rose 14% – the old consumer Windows business is dying.This is illustrated in the company’s quarterly report, where the business units that delivered the growth were all in non-Windows areas.•SQL Server continued to gain market share with revenue growing double-digits •System Center showed continued strength with double-digit revenue growth •Commercial cloud services revenue more than doubled•Office 365 commercial seats and Azure customers both grew triple-digits. Drilling down into the numbers the trend against Windows is even more stark, here’s a chart of the performance of the division over the last ten years.Graph 1: Microsoft Windows division financial performanceAs we see, life was good for Microsoft Windows until the iPad arrived. Following Apple’s proof that tablet computers could deliver what business and home customers wanted from a portable device, Windows’ revenue stagnated and now income and margins are falling.The devices and services strategy of outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer recognizes is areflection of how Windows is becoming irrelevant to the business.It’s hard to see where Microsoft now goes with Windows, the product still remains a key part of the business with 22% of revenues – although that’s down from 27% last year – and it’s hard to see a buyer parting with the hundreds of billions the division would be worth as a stand-alone business.For Steve Ballmer’s successor as Microsoft CEO dealing with the Windows problem will be one of many big issues they’ll have to deal with, the future of the once iconic product though won’t define the future of the business.(source: /2014/01/27/milestones-of-the-personal-computer-industry/,/2014/01/24/microsoft-edges-towards-the-post-pc-era-and-the-end-of-windows/)。
Unit 3 Milestones and Giants in IT Industry1.通过背景讨论、阅读概念学习文章，充分了解Thompson和Ritchie如何设计和创建Unix，掌握行业术语；2.通过案例分析文章阅读和学习，学生了解21世纪个人电脑历史上的几个里程碑以及对社会意义，并能完成课后的相关案例分析报告；3.学生能够撰写商务新闻，并进行口头陈述4.了解科技术语翻译Part One Concept LearningTask 1 Think before You Read1.1 Serendipity，是意外发现珍奇事物的才能，机缘凑巧的意思。
课文里Thompson认为Unix系统的产生是serendipity（P38），老师可以带领学生理解Unix的诞生过程，Thompson的不断实验和改进，引导学生讨论Unix的诞生是否是机缘巧合，学生的结论很可能两个答案都有支持者，正如Jeff Bezos和Louis Pasteur的两句名言一样。
亚马逊的创始人Jeff Bezos认为一切发明也许都是机缘巧合，教师可以引导学生探究Bezos的成功路径，无论是早期投资谷歌公司，还是建立太空公司，还是目前进军硬件领域，每个决定都是他基于不断思考和创新，不怕失败的意志，绝非纯粹机缘。
Louis Pasteur是著名的生物学家，他坚信每一个机会都青睐有准备的人，因为他一直在实验室中坚持着，他的成功就是因为做了比别人多的实验，不曾放弃。
1.2其他10位IT行业先锋和领军人物以及他们的事迹（ppt里有）1.Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the chairman, chief executive, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. His personal wealth, as of December 2015, is estimated to be $46 billion.2.Alan TuringAlan Mathison Turing (June 1912 –7 June 1954) was a pioneering British computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence..3.Steven Paul "Steve" JobsSteven Paul “Steve” Jobs (February 24, 1955 –October 5, 2011) was an American information technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc.; CEO and largest shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios; a member of The Walt Disney Company‘s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT Inc. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Shortly after his death, Jobs’s official biographer, Walter Isaacson, described him as the “creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, m usic, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.”4.Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky (August 9, 1927 –January 24, 2016) has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in two books: The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind (which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT).He received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard (1950) and Princeton (1954). In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical arms, hands and other robotic devices, the Confocal Scanning Microscope, the "Muse" synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and one of the first LOGO "turtles". A member of the NAS, NAEand Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.5.Linus Benedict TorvaldsLinus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer, who is the creator of the Linux kernel and for a long time, principal developer; that became the kernel for operating systems (and many distributions of each), such as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel".He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.6.John von NeumannJohn von Neumann (December 28, 1903 –February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American pure and applied mathematician, physicist, inventor, and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, geometry, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, fluid dynamics and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics.He was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed), and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. He published 150 papers in his life; 60 in pure mathematics, 20 in physics, and 60 in applied mathematics.7.Gordon Earle MooreGordon Earle Moore (born January 3, 1929) is an American businessman, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation, and the author of Moore's law.Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade.In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. His prediction proved accurate for several decades, and the lawwas used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.8.Bob MetcalfeBob Metcalfe (born April 7, 1946) is best known for co-inventing the Ethernet, today’s standard packet plumbing for the Internet, in 1973 and for founding 3Com Corporation in 1979 (merged with Hewlett-Packard in 2010), an early provider of Internet hardware and software. Starting in January 2011, he holds the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Innovation at The University of Texas at Austin.On Aug. 3 in Berlin, the Internet Society inducted Professor Bob Metcalfe into the Internet Hall of Fame for his significant contributions to the advancement of the global Internet.Read more about Bob Metcalfe at /1998/11/metcalfe/ 9.Michael Saul DellMichael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Dell Inc., one of the world’s leading se llers of personal computers (PCs). He was ranked the 41st richest person in the world on 2012 Forbes list of billionaires, with a net worth of US$22.4 billion as of December 2014.In 2011, his 243.35 million shares of Dell stock were worth $3.5 billion, giving him 12% ownership of the company. His remaining wealth of roughly $10 billion is invested in other companies and is managed by a firm whose name, MSD Capital, incorporates Dell's initials. On January 5, 2013 it was announced that Michael Dell had bid to take Dell Inc. private for $24.4 billion in the biggest management buyout since the Great Recession.10. Douglas Carl EngelbartDouglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 –July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces.Engelbart's Law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.2.1 Find out the Chinese equivalent to each of the following technical terms.2.2 Answer the following questions according to the passage.1.Who is Kenneth Thompson?Kenneth Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system and invented the B programming language.2.What is the project of Multics operating system designed for?Multics (Multiplexing Information and Computer Services) was an experimental operating system for GE-645 mainframe, developed in 1960s by MIT, Bell Labs, and GE.3.How was the idea of now ubiquitous Unix was born?In 1969, Bell Labs withdrew from the MULTICS project and Thompson decided to write his own operating system to run his game. With the help of his colleagues , they made experiment with some Multics concepts and redo it on a much smaller scale. Thus the idea of now ubiquitous Unix was born.4.Could you describe PDF 7？PDF 7 is a minicomputer, and Ken Thompson wrote the first UNIX system in assembly language on a PDF-7.5.What was the benefit of returning to UCB in 1975 for Ken?For Thompson, the benefit was, in addition to the nostalgia, the opportunity to work with a new group of people and the consequent additional intellectual stimulation.6.Ken viewed the great success of UNIX as being largely a matter of serendipity.What do you think of this “serendipity”?Serendipity comes after hard work and commitment before we finally discover or create valuable things.7.Ken viewed his own success in developing the system to the fact that he is abottom-up thinker. What did he mean by bottom-up thinker?A bottom-up thinker starts from the details rather than a general idea, who canlink elements together to form larger subsystems, which then in turn are linked, sometimes in many levels, until a complete top-level system is formed.8.Paraphrase on this this sentence, “It is also an example of how a single personwith an idea and dedication can accomplish something that eludes large organizations with huge concentrations of talent and massive budgets.”A single person with an idea and dedication can also change the world, whereaslarge organizations with talents and massive budgets sometimes will fail to accomplish.2.3 Complete the following sentences by using the words and expressions in the box.1.ubiquitous2.massive3.facilitate4.withdraw5.paradigmunch7.initially8.portable2.4 Further Discussion1. What is the role of Unix in IT development?The discussion can focus on two aspects: 1) it is free and open source; 2) it playsa vital role for Android system, which is built on top of the Linux kernel2. Share your experience of intellectual stimulation and summarize the keyelements for beneficial intellectual stimulation.The discussion could revolve around two phases: 1) reflecting the experience of learning with community, such as with classmates, with lab teammates, etc. 2) reflecting on the benefit of intellectual stimulation, for example, reasoning/ connection/questions/ideas etc.3.2 Translate the following sentences into Chinese.1. 20世纪60年代，美国电话电报公司贝尔实验室年轻的工程师肯尼斯（肯）·汤普森正为Multics操作系统项目工作。
