🚀 go-pugleaf

When I was there (around Christmas 1988), there was an image-recognition
program running on something or another -- you stuck one of several provided
shapes under a camera, the box grabbed a frame, did edge-detection on it,
and printed "this is a triangle" or such.  Not amazingly amazing, but
interactive.  There was also a core simulator running on a GIGI, which I
would dearly like to get the sources for.

>Who really cares about seeing a
>large ugly box with lots of tubes if it can't actually DO anything?

The people who go to "trade shows" and "conferences".

>were prohibitively expensive.  An ENIAC would be more expensive to
>build today than the original was, but it should be possible to
>simulate one, right?  Anyone know how the thing was programmed?

At first, it was handwired, kinda like the IBM-style "plugboards".  Later
they adapted a couple of huge "function tables" (a big board with a bunch
of switches) for use essentially as a PROM.

>My guess is some kind of plug board, but that's just a guess.  Now
>imagine Xeniac running on your Sun, with mouse buttons in place of
>the plugs...

>Does anyone know what the first stored program computer was?  I'm
>sure we could simulate its machine language, or assembler if it
>had one.

That all depends on what you call a stored-program computer, and whether or
not you recognize the ABC heap.  When I took a History of Computing class the
instructor had an EDSAC simulator that ran on a microvax, and we were supposed
to write a program of some sort of it.  He decided that since not everyone in
the class could get to a vax (untrue, actually), that he'd have us mail
our programs to someone who would run them.  Of course, mine never ran, and
the assistant who ran them would just say "it doesn't work", so I didn't
see it actually running.




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beak is                                                          beak is not