Hi Denis -- on Apr 16 2020 at 17:26, you wrote:

DM>  The first thing John Jackson did was to ask some friends who owned
DM> their own computers about what sort of computer to get. The first
DM> person he talked to summarized it by saying:
DM> 'You need at least 2Gb of RAM with *twin USB-drives* and
DM> *laser-printer* with associated software'.  A second friend said:
DM> 'What you need is a *64-bit* machine with *VDU*, *hard-drive* and
*daisy-wheel* attached'.
DM>  At this point John went awaynpt undestanding a word, and almost gave up
hope.

DM>  TASK. Explain each of the *emphasized* words above in simple
DM> language in a sentence, to show the meaning of each.

Twin USB-drives. A USB drive is also called a thumb drive. Twinning them
simply means have 2 slots for such a drive. Modern computers typically
have anywhere from 4 to 10 slots.

A laser printer is a type of printer using a heated drum to attract and
then deposit very fine ink particles on the page. The heat then fuses
these particles to form a very sharp image, whether text or photo.

A 64 bit machine is one that operates on 64 bit of data at once.
Windows7 and later are 64 bit operating systems.

A VDU is a video display unit -- what we call a monitor.

A hard-drive is a device for storing data encoded onto a metallic disk
via a magnetic process. Technically, only a spinning disk is a
hard-drive but we use the term to include Solid-state drives as well.
And before you ask, a solid-state drive is simply a USB drive in a
different physical shape.

A daisy-wheel was a type of printer that used a typewriter ribbon and a
spinning (daisy-wheel) disk. The disk was spun until the desired
character was in place, then struck through the ribbon onto the paper.
They were soon replaced by the dot-matrix printer, which then gave way
to the laser printer.




Cheers... Dallas

--- timEd/NT 1.30+