According to Gordon Bell's Computer Structures: Reading and Examples, the best-case memory access time of the LGP-30 was 2.34 milliseconds†. Most instructions r

According to Gordon Bell's Computer Structures: Reading and Examples, the best-case memory access time of the LGP-30 was 2.34 milliseconds†. Most instructions required two memory accesses (the instruction itself, and an operand), which gives you around 200 instructions per second. The machine had only two registers: the accumulator, and the program counter. The only place you could use a pointer was in the address field of an instruction. In order to increment a pointer, you would load an instruction into the accumulator, add to it, and store it back. Best case, you could increment 67 pointers per second. Worst case, nine. Mel's job, in this instance, was not to write beautiful maintainable code. It was to write a demo that would sell the machine to potential customers, rather than boring them to death. † http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/computer_structures__readings_and_examples/00000237.htm http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/computer...