🚀 go-pugleaf

The Ferut (Ferranti Mark 1) computer also used Williams tubes. It had, I
think, 8, each of which had 65 words of 65 bits (2-way parity check, I
suppose).  The bits were laid out in an 8x8 array of 8x8 bits, with one
extra line of bits on the right and the bottom.  Two (or 3?) of the
Williams tubes had their displays replicated on the console.  One was
the B-store (later called an index register).  Christopher Strachey
programmed this (long before the days of assemblers) as a visual
display of a checkerboard, and the machine played checkers interactively
against a user who entered his moves on the teletype keyboard.  I consider
this to be one of the great early programming tours-de-force.

(Part 2) One day the teletype line was noisy (perhaps a dying tube or
something), and instead of the output looking like "Your move" ...
"You have 2 minutes to move" ... "If you don't move in 1 minute I will
claim the game" ... "I claim the game",  It looked more like #@xf%n ....
as in cartoon swearing.  At one point in this it said 'swounds<cr>
and shortly thereafter, it said "Od's blood I claim the game".  One
might ask whether there were any Shakespearean monkeys in the refrigerator
room (which was bigger than the computer room).

In addition to the Williams tubes, the machine had a fast drum backing
store, containing 1K of 65 bit words.  It also had a loudspeaker, which
could be pulsed by some command (I think "/V").  My very first program
was Good King Wenceslas played on this loudspeaker in subharmonics of
1 kHz.

The time of all this was summer of 1954 (maybe 53 or 55, but I think 54).
-- 
Martin Taylor (m...@zorac.dciem.dnd.ca ...!uunet!dciem!mmt) (416) 635-2048
If the universe transcends formal methods, it might be interesting.
     (Steven Ryan).