4 ms·
I knew about the Burroughs B5000, but this tidbit about its 1956 predecessor is thought provoking: The 205 had a number of interesting characteristics besides
by ableal 16y ago
I knew about the Burroughs B5000, but this tidbit about its 1956 predecessor is thought provoking:
The 205 had a number of interesting characteristics besides being a decimal computer. It utilized an spinning magnetic drum with average access time of 8.5 milliseconds. The drum had two sections. The high speed access section which had each piece of data duplicated 10 times and offset on various bands on the drum to increase the access time by 10. Here the average data access time was .85 milliseconds.
- hga 16y agoYeah, that's interesting. The 1954 IBM 650 is rather famous for each instruction having the address of the next instruction; one of the final phases of program construction was to lay out the program optimally so that the next instruction would be just about to come under a drum read head. Wikipedia says there was also an instruction optimized for drum reading (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_650 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_650).
- koenigdavidmj 16y agoRelevant: The Story of Mel. http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html