雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第7章:運轉起來(75)
The ENIAC project was immensely impressive, quite enough to give people allowed to see it the sensation of seeing the future.
It employed no fewer than 19,000 electronic valves. As such it surpassed the Colossi,
它使用了超過19, 000個電子管，在這方面超越了巨人機。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.
這兩個機器在很多方面都很類似，但是有一個區別是，ENIAC直到1945年夏天還沒有完成，它也來得太晚了，對戰爭一點用都沒有了。
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'.
之所以比巨人機使用了更多的電子管，是因爲它是以十進制進行存儲的，它用10個電子管分別表示10個數字，比如用第9個真空管導通，來表示數字"9"。In contrast the Colossi operated on single pulses which represented the logical 'yes' or 'no' of holes in telegraph tape.
而巨人機採用的是單脈衝，用紙帶上的孔來表示邏輯上的"是"或"非"。But this was a fairly superficial point of difference.
但這只是一個非常表面的不同。Both alike demonstrated that thousands of valves, hitherto regarded as too unreliable for operation en masse, could be kept in simultaneous use.
這兩個機器都證明，上萬個電子管是可以組合起來使用的，而在這之前，人們一直認爲這樣的集成是不可靠的。And the ENIAC project was embodying the idea that Zuse, Aiken and Stibitz had missed.
ENIAC實現了楚澤、艾肯和斯蒂比茲都沒有實現的想法，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.
與馬克II號巨人機一樣，它能夠自動進行決策行爲，根據一步計算的結果，來決定下一步的操作。ENIAC實現了條件分支，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.
這樣的設計，使它能夠根據計算程序的需要，在存儲的指令當中進行任意次數的重複執行，而不需要人類進行操作。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.
這些都是巴貝奇早就看到了的，但他沒有看到兩件事：一是電子元件的速度有這麼快，二是ENIAC是一臺實實在在造出來的機器。
