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The Baby was the first stored-program computer, i.e. the first computer to store the program instructions in electronic memory, as opposed to a physical medium
by mcjiggerlog 8y ago
The Baby was the first stored-program computer, i.e. the first computer to store the program instructions in electronic memory, as opposed to a physical medium like the Z3's punched film. It even says so in the article you linked.
- anananao 8y agoThe distinction is vanishingly small. Every new memory technology (paper tape, punch card, drum, core, rom, prom, eeprom, magnetic disk, NFS, NOR flash, NAND flash, stone tablets, etc, etc) would then generate a "first computer to store on X". X is just a storage technology. Heck - computers from the 70 still stored programs on paper punch card and only loaded a few opcodes into RAM. If you are aware of what cache hiearchy is, then this distinction becomes even fainter - the Z3 might have some instructions cached as relay state - electrical storage.
- walshemj 8y agoNo I worked with computers from the 70's (PDP's) and you did load the program into memory. You might on rare occasions load a bootstrap program into memory from paper tape or even by hand from the console tho.
- rootbear 8y agoMore specifically, it stored the program in the same memory as the data. I don't think the Z3 did that, but I might be wrong.
- blattimwind 8y ago> it stored the program in the same memory as the data Doesn't make sense as a distinction for "stored-program computer", since that's just called a Von Neumann architecture.
- rootbear 8y agoUsing a unified memory allowed for self modifying code. That's not something we do now, but those early machines had extremely limited memory and every trick was needed just to get anything done.
- Squonk42 8y agoIt is not a "trick", it is one of the only possible ways to achieve Turing-completeness: code self-modification, conditional branches or extensive (exponential) computation (Zuse Z3).