Re:The Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer
by longwave on Friday June 22, 2018 @07:39AM
(#17373177)
As the Z3 cannot perform conditional branches I assume it was difficult or impossible for the hardware at the time to do anything other than move the tape in a linear sequence in a single clock cycle. A stored-program computer that uses a program counter to point to the current instruction (the position on the "tape") seems to be a significant step forward.
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Re:The Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer
by gnufx on Friday June 22, 2018 @09:02AM
(#17373614)
Right. If I recall correctly a proof it was potentially Turing complete is relatively recent and obscure, so it's difficult to consider it a general purpose computer like the SSEM. Credit to Zuse, like the pre-war Polish cryptographers, anyhow.
Re:The Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer
by blattimwind on Friday June 22, 2018 @08:27AM
(#17373407)
This seems to me like a far more salient distinction than how the program is stored.
Instruction pointer and explicit branching.
The Z3 is still (in a theoretical sense) Turing-complete, even without branching instructions (exponential path construction).
Re:The Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer
by Squonk42 on Friday June 22, 2018 @08:45AM
(#17373512)
Extract from http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents/...
"We can therefore say that, from an abstract theoretical perspective, the computing model of the Z3 is equivalent to the computing model of today's computers. From a practical perspective, and in the way the Z3 was really programmed, it was not equivalent to modern computers."