The Computer
Although it appears it was never an official recommendation, by the mid-1950s the DRTE decided that the best way to really develop transistor techniques in a complex system was to build a computer. This was not something they needed for their own use at the time, simply an example of an extremely complex system that would test their capabilities like few other systems could. But as development continued, many of the engineers involved became more interested in computer design than electronics, outside the DRTE's charter and eventually a source of friction between the group and the DRB who funded them.
Starting about 1955, David Florida drove the development of a computer using Moody's flip-flop design. He examined existing computer designs and concluded that the current limitation in computer power was due largely to the burnout rate of the tubes, more tubes meant more frequent burnouts. Although a number of truly massive machines had been built, like SAGE, most machines were much smaller in order to improve uptime. With transistors this limitation was removed; machines could be built considerably more complex with little effect on reliability, as long as one was willing to pay the price for more transistors. With the price falling all the time, Florida's design included every feature he imagined would be useful in a scientific machine.
In particular, the design was to include a number of subsystems for input/output, a binary-coded decimal converter, floating-point hardware including a square root function, a number of loop instructions and index registers to support them, and used a complex three-address instruction format. The three-address system meant that every instruction included the address of up to two operands and the result. Interestingly the system did not include an accumulator, the results of all operations being written back to main memory. This was desirable at the time, when computer memories were generally comparable in speed to the processors (today memory is much slower).
Read more about this topic: DRTE Computer
Famous quotes containing the word computer:
“The archetype of all humans, their ideal image, is the computer, once it has liberated itself from its creator, man. The computer is the essence of the human being. In the computer, man reaches his completion.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)