{"id":86,"date":"2008-03-31T17:08:53","date_gmt":"2008-03-31T16:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=86"},"modified":"2008-03-31T17:08:53","modified_gmt":"2008-03-31T16:08:53","slug":"now-thats-what-i-call-retro-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"Now that&#8217;s what I CALL retro computing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I work at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.manchester.ac.uk\/\">University of Manchester<\/a> which is where the world&#8217;s first ever stored-program electronic digital computer was made back in 1948.  It was originally called the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine\">Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine<\/a> but everyone called it Baby and it didn&#8217;t occur to it to mind.  Before I get flamed to death by US computer historians &#8211; yes the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ENIAC\">ENIAC<\/a> was built 2 years before Baby but it had a fundamentally different architecure (as explained by Alan Burlison in his blog &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.com\/alanbur\/entry\/visiting_baby\">here<\/a>).  As Alan says, if you wanted to reprogram ENIAC, you needed a pair of pliars.<\/p>\n<p>Many people who are a lot more eloquent than me have written a lot about the history of this machine (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.computer50.org\/\">here<\/a> for example) so I won&#8217;t say too much about it here except that it had only 128 bytes of memory which were arranged in 32 x 32 bit binary words and that it had an instruction set of only 7 commands which made programming it a bit tricky to say the least.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/retro\/tube.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>If you think you are a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Real_programmer\">real<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/378\/\">programmer<\/a> who is up to the challenge of coding for a 60 year old machine then Manchester University is holding a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.manchester.ac.uk\/Digital60\/Digital60-AliceCompetition\/programming-contest\/\">program &#8220;The Baby&#8221; competition<\/a> (closing date 1 May 2008) to celebrate the Baby&#8217;s 60th anniversary.  There is a photo realistic Java-based simulator of the machine, complete with example programs, over at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.manchester.ac.uk\/Digital60\/Baby\/\">competition website<\/a> along with an instruction manual to get you started.  With only 7 instructions to learn how hard can it be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I work at the University of Manchester which is where the world&#8217;s first ever stored-program electronic digital computer was made back in 1948. It was originally called the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine but everyone called it Baby and it didn&#8217;t occur to it to mind. Before I get flamed to death by US computer [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-retro-computers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}