F2F Class notes 17th September (Eddie)

substantive adj = of value, of importance, significant, which has content

fascinating adj = extremely interesting

It was the summer of 1959, and the United States needed a Cold War win. In 1957, the Soviet bloc scored a major technological victory with Sputnik 1. The next year, China’s Communist leadership launched the sweeping, and ultimately devastating, Great Leap Forward. In the spring of 1959 in Cuba, Fidel Castro’s guerrillas forced president Fulgencio Batista into exile. The U.S. needed to recapture the momentum and demonstrate that it was still at the helm of world affairs. The plan: President Dwight D. Eisenhower was to unveil the world’s first Chinese computer.

The invention of the first Chinese computer would be a major victory, a ‘gift’ from capitalism to the Chinese people. It would score a ‘Free World’ technological and cultural victory, while also raising the possibility of a new infrastructure for the global dissemination and translation of Chinese-language material. Whoever possessed such a device could flood the world with Chinese texts at a rate never before seen—potentially a major propaganda advantage. Moreover, for the Chinese language and its speakers, who numbered over 1 billion, it would have inaugurated a new age of information technology that many thought was only possible for the alphabetic world. It would mean that the Chinese language was not ‘backward’ in the way that many had claimed.

Soviet bloc = the former USSR and the countries around it

Sputnik 1 = Earth’s first artificial satellite

ultimately adv = in the end

devastating adj = causing a great deal of damage

guerillas = small, independent groups of soldiers

exile n = the state of being banished from a place

to capture v = to catch

to recapture v = to catch again

momentum n = the force of an idea, or a movement

at the helm of something = in command of something

to unveil v = to present, to introduce

capitalism n = a system based on private ownership of goods

infrastructure n = network

dissemination n = distribution, spread

to possess v = to have

propaganda n = messages supporting a regime or a system or ideology

inauguration n = opening, start

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/autocomplete-was-invented-80-years-ago/499955/