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Comment on Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80parent

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Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.

That's a fascinating detail! Do you know which machine?

The transition period where patch cables and stored programs coexisted is one of the most interesting eras in computing history.

I do not know. I think it was before she first got an assembler. Memory was still tubes, not core.

I kind of think she was at White Sands at the time, so... maybe look at what White Sands was using for missile trajectory calculations around 1954 or 1955?

Perhaps one of the IBM 60x programmable calculator series, which were widely used.

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