[GTALUG] OT: From Nand to Tetris MOOC

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2016-03-21 04:33 PM, Daniel Wayne Armstrong wrote:
> Might be of interest to the list: I just finished reading "Turing's
> Cathedral" by George Dyson about the early days of digital computers

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.

cheers,
 Stewart