Questions tagged [edsac]
For questions concerning EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, built at Cambridge University between 1947 and 1949 and subsequently modified into the LEO I, the first computer deployed for commercial business processing.
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Did any computers use automatically-operated mechanical storage as electronically-read-addressable memory
From what I understand of ENIAC, it had a very large number of manually-operated rotary switches which behaved as ROM. While programming ENIAC in the early days required a plugboard, the machine was ...
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Why did the EDSAC use mercury delay lines?
In this video about the EDSAC replica, he talks about the mercury delay lines which were used in the original EDSAC machine. They're unreliable, toxic, and relatively expensive.
Delay lines can also ...
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How was EDSAC program code represented on uniselectors?
(I hope we haven't covered this somewhere...)
The 1949 EDSAC could boot, as we say nowadays, from a bank of uniselectors. It's unclear to me how program code was actually represented on the ...
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