Questão 1535501

Text for the items from 13 to 22.

Tony Brooker, 1925‐2019

1 Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer

scientist who designed the programming language for the

world’s first commercial computer, died on November 20 at

4 a nursing home in Hexham, England.

Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer

research at the University of Cambridge when one day, on

7 his way home from a mountain‐climbing trip in North Wales,

he stopped at the University of Manchester to tour its

computer lab. It was there that he met the legendary

10 Professor Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer

age.

Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October

13 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti

Mark 1. His job was to make the Mark 1 “usable”. Professor

Turing had written a user’s manual, but it was far from

16 intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in

binary code — patterns made up of 0s and 1s — and they

had to write them backward, from right to left, because this

19 was the way the hardware read them.

It was “extremely neat and very clever but pretty

meaningless and very unfriendly”, Mr. Brooker said.

22 In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a

language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers

and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine —

25 not just the limited group of trained engineers who

understood the hardware.

This marked the beginning of what were later called

28 “high‐level” programming languages — languages that

provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving

commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the

31 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.

As the decades passed, this idea helped expand what

computers were capable of. Without high‐level languages

34 there would be no App Store, and no World Wide Web.

Ralph Anthony Brooker was born on September, 22,

1925 and died on November 20, 2019. He was one of the last

37 survivors of Alan Turing’s generation of computer pioneers.

Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted)

Based on the text and considering the grammatical aspects of the English Language, judge the items from 13 to 22.

“it” (line 13) refers to “Ferranti Mark 1” (lines 13 and 14).