Gosper, are you only guessing that the time units are microseconds? I seem to remember instruction set summary tables sometimes used arbitrary timing units to give them freedom to speed up the entire set by redefining the unit. On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 2:39 AM, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
Sounds well worth to take a photo (or better, scan) and put that online? Computer museum people might hugely appreciate.
Being born only 1964, I do not recall the instruction set :^) You could ask about the machine on stack-overflow if it remains unknown.
Best, jj
* Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> [Aug 04. 2013 08:25]:
A bunch of boxes of my stuff fell off the shelves in the basement. On the floor was this laminated card, in improbably good condition, and of which I have no recollection. It lists three-letter mnemonics, about thirty per side, along with their TIME, plus eight other columns labeled LAR, RAR, LAC, RAC, LBR, RBR, LX, and RX, apparently active registers. Typical rows: 6+ ASL U U CH CH U U U U 51 DVD C(LX) C(RX) CH CH C(LAC) C(RAC) U U Presumably Accumulator(?) Shift Left and DiViDe. The bottom corners read MCF 105 and APRIL 27, 1959 This looks like an improbably rich (and fast) instruction set for 1959. 51 μsec was the Divide speed of the 1963 Univac 1206 (Cray's design). Pre Cray Univac? RCA? Probably not IBM. It must have been the only computer in some large context, given no name on the card. (I doubt there was an "MCF 105"!)
I was a high school sophomore in 1959. I wonder if I got it from the "giant brain" in the basement of the Franklin Institute. Or maybe it's a souvenir replica from some later exhibit? --rwg _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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