14 May
2018
14 May
'18
3:07 a.m.
Yes of course. I used to program the 8 so I remember. But I (sloppily) think of them the
same way although you are correct they are different in implementation. But my key point
is until conditional instructions that change the path come along we are not to the
general purpose computing platform.
Their is a open question about the need to support self modifying code too. I personally
don’t think of that as important as the need for conditional instructions which I do think
need to be there before you can really call it a computer. But that’s my opinion and
others clearly believe neither are needed.
Clem
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On May 13, 2018, at 2:52 AM, Greg 'groggy'
Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 12 May 2018 at 11:04:26 -0400, Clem
Cole wrote:
That's an interesting document, but it refers to the Z1, not the Z3.
But Wikipedia confirms that the Z3 also didn't have conditional
instructions.
Conditional branch is only one way to do that, of course. The PDP-8,
for example, didn't have one, just (like many machines of the day)
conditional skip instructions.
Greg
--
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This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 6:21 PM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Way back on this day in 1941, Conrad Zuse unveiled the Z3; it was the
first programmable automatic computer as we know it (Colossus 1 was not
general-purpose). The last news I heard about the Z3 was that she was
destroyed in an air-raid...
This pretty much started computing, as we know it.
But .. until we also include a conditional branch the ability to do
self modify code we don't really have the machine with think of as
the automatic programmable computer.
Check out:
http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/1993/Who_invented_the_computer.pdf its a
fun read.