Skip to main content

All Questions

10 votes
2 answers
548 views

Did any core-memory computers have a read-and-erase instruction?

Magnetic core, the primary form of computer memory from the mid-fifties to the early seventies or thereabouts, had the slightly awkward property that reading it erased it, so every time the CPU ...
rwallace's user avatar
  • 63.1k
25 votes
1 answer
969 views

Reconstruct the loop from "The Story of Mel"

From Ed Nather's hacker-epic "The Story of Mel" (using the original paragraph-formatting to save space in this question): The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards ...
Quuxplusone's user avatar
17 votes
5 answers
2k views

Has there ever been a instruction set architecture that did not require instruction decoding at all?

I am studying basic principles of instruction set architectures and am considering what it would take to not have any instruction decoding at all. I.e., all the control lines of the computer would be ...
Gunther Schadow's user avatar