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