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When did the IBM 650 have a "Table lookup on Equal" instruction?
In 1959, Donald Knuth wrote an assembly program named SuperSoap for the IBM 650. Here is the manual, and here is a listing of the program (in SuperSoap assembly language). Quoting from the abstract:
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- 3,627
49
votes
10
answers
11k
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Why did 1950s-60s computers have such wide words?
Modern general-purpose computers typically have a 64-bit word size, but looking back in time, we see narrower CPUs. In the early 80s, the 68000 dealt with 32-bit addresses but the ALU was only 16 bits ...
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52
votes
4
answers
7k
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Why did the IBM 650 use bi-quinary?
The IBM 650, announced in 1953, was the world's first mass-produced computer. It represented numbers in decimal, which is understandable, both because it needed to work with exact money amounts, and ...
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