New answers tagged early-computer
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What made the ENIAC "programmable"?
Plugboards are just a way of writing programs. Here is a later example of an IBM plugboard.
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What made the ENIAC "programmable"?
So, when you build a mechanical computer such as the Antikythera mechanism, the behavior of the system, the nature or range of the output never really changes. It's dedicated to a specific type of ...
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What made the ENIAC "programmable"?
"Programmable" means different things to different people. I have a couple of "programmable unijunction transistors" in a drawer: "programmable" means you can set their ...
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What made the ENIAC "programmable"?
Look at the description... this is a one time only programmable computer. Therefore one has several individual programs for different outcomes. Just stop and insert the next .. change when needed.
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What made the ENIAC "programmable"?
The ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer.
A debatable claim, as each of those attributes (*1) is flawed in one way or another.
When we say "programming ...
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How could early computers perform data operations before John von Neumann proposed the concept of ALU?
Especially in the mechanical and electromechanical era, it was common for storage units to be combined with computational circuitry. The easiest way to copy the value of a rotating-wheels accumulator ...
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How could early computers perform data operations before John von Neumann proposed the concept of ALU?
TL;DR:
There seems to be a misconception between ALU as a box in high level discussion about computer structure and 'an' ALU as a concrete implementation of a logic to produce some calculative result.
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How could early computers perform data operations before John von Neumann proposed the concept of ALU?
What computers? Before 1945, there were no stored-program electronic digital computers. The ENIAC existed, but that was designed to a completely different architecture, in that 'programming' was ...
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How could early computers perform data operations before John von Neumann proposed the concept of ALU?
What von Neumann proposed was the idea of the ALU as a subsystem of an electronic computer, conceptually separate from the memory and input/output subsystems. The concept of hardware for doing ...
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