I guess, Konrad Zuse in the 1930s used movie film for controlling his
machines, too.
The instructions were on the (movie film) tape, and by stepping the
tape, the machine
executed the instructions on the tape. There were no control
instructions, no conditional
branches (of course); only an instruction which stopped the machine.
You could "code a loop" by simply looping the tape :-)
Later Zuse machines in the 1950s of course had conditional instructions
added and
all that stuff, and fetched their instructions from drum or core memory.
BTW: the Telefunken mainframe from the 1970s was boot loaded from paper
tape
("Lochstreifen"); it contained the very first stages of the operating
system.
When that (sort of) BIOS was installed, it fetched the other parts of the
operating system from a sort of fixed head disk called "Trommelspeicher".
On IBM mainframes of that time, they invented 8 inch floppy disks to do
this,
if I recall correctly.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 15.01.2017 um 04:27 schrieb Phil Smith:
My dad spent a lot of time in Czechoslovakia. His best friend there was an
engineer, and used to do programming using a paper-tape machine-but they didn't
have paper tape, so they'd use old movie film from Soviet movie industry.
Always wondered what kinds of images were on those frames!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
