On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 09:38:31AM -0400, Stewart C. Russell wrote: > I liked the bit where they couldn't get the technical powerhouse of RCA > to get the promised Selectron thermionic memory devices working, so they > had to revert to Williams tubes. These had been running successfully in > British computers since the mid-1940s. As with most early computing, > seemingly the main difficulty was keeping the whole system cool while > being able to discern signal from noise. That, and vermin control. > > The IAS computer is definitely a better first computer to look at than > the first stored programme digital computer, the Manchester SSEM > (“Baby”). It had 7 instructions, could only subtract, and had one crude > conditional. It takes real dedication to do anything useful with such a > sparse instruction set. Still, people have implemented Baby emulators on > pretty much everything — including the microcontroller scavenged from a > low-energy lightbulb.
You only need one instruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer That will do it all. It's awful to program though and certainly not efficient. -- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
