Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Cardiac (was Re: What was the "GENIAC"?) References: <390E9928.2CA9B77F@il.ibm.com> <8enfar$s5u$1@news.kersur.net> <1bya5sk2r9.fsf@viper.cs.nmsu.edu> From: merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) Message-ID: Organization: Stonehenge Consulting Services; Portland, Oregon, USA Lines: 34 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0805 (Gnus v5.8.5) Emacs/20.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: 03 May 2000 03:19:22 -0700 NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.108.254.12 X-Complaints-To: abuse@onemain.com X-Trace: nntp3.onemain.com 957349080 192.108.254.12 (Wed, 03 May 2000 06:18:00 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 06:18:00 EDT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!feed2.onemain.com!feed1.onemain.com!nntp3.onemain.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:55312 >>>>> "Joe" == Joe Pfeiffer writes: Joe> Anybody but me remember the ``Digicomp I and II?'' I still have my Joe> Digicomp I. Ahh yes, I had one of those... never could quite figure out how it solved the "crossing the river" problem. Got to play with real computers shortly thereafter... if you call an ASR-33 attached to an HP 2100 a "real computer"... (I did! :). And speaking of learning devices, what about the "Cardiac" "cardboard integrated automatic computer"? Had a small instruction set, and memory was just 100 cells written in pencil, by you. The boot loader was "001" hardwired into memory cell "000", which said "read a card into memory 01", in which you started your deck with "002" "800" (gawd how do I remember that after 30 years) which put "load memory 02 from card" into 01, and executed that immediately, which put "800" (jump to 00) as the end of the boot cycles. Then you just kept listing the memory cell and the contents, untill finally a 8xx to start the program. Yeah, you could boot the machine with a single hardwired instruction, and two instructions on the input card deck. Cool. I see that http://www.anamorph.com/docs/progs/default.html contains a link for an (incomplete) HyperCard implementation of this beast, if you want to see more details. In searching for that, I found that the resumes of more than a few people online also reference Cardiac (it was made by Bell Labs, apparently) as part of their reason for being a net geek. Very cool. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!