[TUHS] RIP John Backus
Arthur Krewat
krewat at kilonet.net
Sun Mar 18 04:52:29 AEST 2018
On 3/17/2018 1:49 PM, Paul McJones wrote:
> It first ran on the IBM 704, whose index registers subtracted (as did
> the follow-on 709, 7090, etc), so array indexing went from higher
> memory addresses to lower.
Leave it to IBM to do something backwards.
Of course, that was in 1954, so I can't complain, it was 11 years before
I was born. But that's ... odd.
Was subtraction easier than addition with digital electronics back then?
I would think that they were both the same level of effort (clock
cycles) so why do something obviously backwards logically?
ak
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