Background
Designed at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory largely as an experiment in transistorized design and the construction of very large core memory systems, the TX-0 was essentially a transistorized version of the equally famous Whirlwind, also built at Lincoln Lab. While the Whirlwind filled an entire floor of a large building, TX-0 fit in a single reasonably sized room and yet was somewhat faster. Like the Whirlwind, the TX-0 was equipped with a display system, in this case a 12" oscilloscope hooked to output pins of the processor allowing it to display 512×512 points in a 7" by 7" array.
The TX-0 was a fully 16-bit computer with a 16-bit address range and 16-bit operations. Its word size was 18 bits; this allowed for 16 bits of data and 2 bits of instructions. These 2 bits could create 4 possible instructions, which included store, add, and conditional branch instructions as a basic set. The fourth instruction, "operate", took additional operands and allowed access to a number of "micro-orders" which could be used separately or together to provide many other useful instructions. An "add" instruction took 10 microseconds.
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