双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第7章:运转起来(76)
Like the Colossus, the ENIAC had been designed for a specific task, that of calculating artillery range tables.
Essentially it was to simulate the trajectories of shells through varying conditions of air resistance and wind velocity, which involved the summation of thousands of little pieces of trajectory.
它在本质上模拟了炮弹在不同的气压和风速条件下的弹道，这涉及到成千上万的计算项。It had external switches which would be set to store the constant parameters for a trajectory calculation, and further external devices for setting up the instructions on how to calculate the segments of motion. Then there would be valves to hold the intermediate working figures.
它配置了外部的开关，用来设定弹道计算所需的常数，还配置了其它的外部设备，用来输入指定的指令，电子管则用来存储计算过程中的数值。
In these arrangements it resembled the Colossi.
这些都与巨人机很像。But in both cases, people had quickly discovered the possibility for using the machines for a wider range of tasks than those for which they had been designed.
通过这两个项目，人们很快就看到了新的前景，这些机器可以用来执行更广泛的任务，而不仅是当初设计的那些。The role of the original Colossus had been much extended by Donald Michie and Jack Good, and then the Mark II had once been set up to punch out a deciphered message, although this was done out of interest, not for the sake of efficiency.
唐纳德·米奇和杰克·古德，很大限度地扩展了原始巨人机的能力，后来的马克II号还被用来为破译的信息打孔，但这只是为了好玩，而不是为了提高效率。Even though a parasite on the German cipher machine, the flexibility offered by its instruction table facility was such that it could even be 'almost' set up to perform numerical multiplication.
尽管它的目标是德国密码机，但其指令表的灵活性，使它可以很轻松地摇身一变成为数字乘法机。The ENIAC was flexible in a more serious way, and von Neumann had already discovered that it could be used, when ready, for Los Alamos problems.
而ENIAC则具有更加严格意义上的灵活性，冯·诺伊曼很快就看到，它可以用来解决洛斯阿拉莫斯实验室的问题。
