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The ENIAC project was immensely impressive, quite enough to give people allowed to see it the sensation of seeing the future.
ENIAC项目令人印象超级深刻，足以给人一种看到了未来的感觉。
It employed no fewer than 19,000 electronic valves. As such it surpassed the Colossi,
它使用了超过19, 000个电子管，在这方面超越了巨人机。
with which in many ways it was comparable, though one difference was that in the summer of 1945 the ENIAC was still incomplete, and would come too late to have any use whatever in the war.
这两个机器在很多方面都很类似，但是有一个区别是，ENIAC直到1945年夏天还没有完成，它也来得太晚了，对战争一点用都没有了。
It required a greater total number of valves than the Colossi because it stored long decimal numbers—the more so because of the primitive system the designers had employed whereby ten valves were allocated to each decimal digit required, a '9' being represented by the ninth of those valves being 'on'.
之所以比巨人机使用了更多的电子管，是因为它是以十进制进行存储的，它用10个电子管分别表示10个数字，比如用第9个真空管导通，来表示数字"9"。
In contrast the Colossi operated on single pulses which represented the logical 'yes' or 'no' of holes in telegraph tape.
而巨人机采用的是单脉冲，用纸带上的孔来表示逻辑上的"是"或"非"。
But this was a fairly superficial point of difference.
但这只是一个非常表面的不同。
Both alike demonstrated that thousands of valves, hitherto regarded as too unreliable for operation en masse, could be kept in simultaneous use.
这两个机器都证明，上万个电子管是可以组合起来使用的，而在这之前，人们一直认为这样的集成是不可靠的。
And the ENIAC project was embodying the idea that Zuse, Aiken and Stibitz had missed.
ENIAC实现了楚泽、艾肯和斯蒂比兹都没有实现的想法，
Like the Mark II Colossi, with their ability to automate acts of decision, the results of one counting operation automatically deciding what step was taken next, the ENIAC would have a form of conditional branching.
与马克II号巨人机一样，它能够自动进行决策行为，根据一步计算的结果，来决定下一步的操作。ENIAC实现了条件分支，
It was designed so that it could be made to hop to and fro within the stock of instructions supplied to it, repeating sections as many times as the progress of the calculation showed was necessary, without the interference of human management.
这样的设计，使它能够根据计算程序的需要，在存储的指令当中进行任意次数的重复执行，而不需要人类进行操作。
None of this went beyond what Babbage had envisaged—except that electronic components were so much faster, and that the ENIAC was (or was nearly) a reality.
这些都是巴贝奇早就看到了的，但他没有看到两件事：一是电子元件的速度有这么快，二是ENIAC是一台实实在在造出来的机器。
