All Questions
Tagged with early-computer ibm650
3 questions
5
votes
2
answers
629
views
IBM 650 - how many logic gates?
How many logic gates did the IBM 650 have? I'm used to measuring the complexity of a CPU by transistor count, but the 650 was a vacuum tube machine; the number of tubes would also be an interesting ...
- 63.8k
52
votes
4
answers
7k
views
Why did the IBM 650 use bi-quinary?
The IBM 650, announced in 1953, was the world's first mass-produced computer. It represented numbers in decimal, which is understandable, both because it needed to work with exact money amounts, and ...
- 63.8k
29
votes
3
answers
4k
views
Why does an instruction include the address of the next instruction on the IBM 650?
The IBM 650 seems to be a load-store machine. One advantage of a load-store machine is that the instruction can be shorter because there's less pressure to pack more information into it. But the IBM ...
- 39.7k