3 ms·
Sounds like there's a decent chance that one could achieve similar things with something like Modula's M-code. Also compressing a large program into a small co
by jhgb 5y ago
Sounds like there's a decent chance that one could achieve similar things with something like Modula's M-code.
Also compressing a large program into a small computer by having a part of the program written in compact interpreted code dates back at the very least to Apollo's Guidance Computer's INTERPRETER component.
- kragen 5y agoCompressing a large program into a small computer by having part of the program written in compact interpreted code dates back at least to Short Code on the UNIVAC I in 01950, which was "short" because it could fit six instructions per machine word instead of the usual two. Of course Turing's original hypothetical Universal Machine from 01936 is "universal" precisely because it is an interpreter that can emulate any computing machine, most importantly including itself, but you could reasonably object that Turing didn't actually build a working Universal Machine in the 01930s, and at any rate he wasn't concerned with the question of how to fit a lot of functionality into a small amount of RAM. I've seen references to "Turing's 'short code'" and to "ENIAC Short Code" but I am not sure if they are things that really existed or if someone was just getting their references confused.