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A comment on Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80. Parent comment

Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by AnimalMuppet on Thursday March 19, 2026 @02:48PM (#47444034)
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.
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Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by adrian_b on Friday March 20, 2026 @01:15AM (#47450770)
Perhaps one of the IBM 60x programmable calculator series, which were widely used.
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Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by DaleBiagio on Friday March 20, 2026 @05:19AM (#47452264)
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.

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Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by AnimalMuppet on Friday March 20, 2026 @08:52AM (#47453837)
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?

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