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54877 Notes on a Colloquium at Cambridge, 3 Jul 1958

 Home > LEO Computers > Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) Archive > CMLEO/DC - David Caminer Papers > Working Files > EDSAC > 54877 Notes on a Coll ... Cambridge, 3 Jul 1958
 

Report by John Pinkerton on a discussion of EDSAC II by Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler at the Mathematics Laboratory at Cambridge.

Research comments: In Section 1 Pinkerton states he was disappointed by this colloquium! 
 
Section 2 talks about claims previously made by Maurice Wilkes on micro-programming (that the order code could be altered after the electronic circuitry had been built) that he is now retracting.
 
Section 3 suggests the order code has been designed for the benefit of the programmer rather than the engineer.
 
Section 4 refers to the tape machine having been designed by Douglas Willis before he moved to Decca and refers to "running the tape out of contact with the head", which Wilkes believes will become standard practice in the future.
 
Section 5 refers to plans for a 300 row per second output punch for paper tape and to having two 1,000 row per second tape readers in operation.
 
Section 6 refers to David Wheeler (EDSAC team) and his work on programming the machine.
 
Section 7 refers to the absence of monitoring facilities and improvements in fault finding. It also reports that there are about 75 authorised users of EDSAC II.
 
Section 8 notes that there is "effectively only one register available to the programmer; this is the accumulator" and that there are "no subsidiary registers as in LEO II" but that these are not required due to the "very high speed of access to the store".
 
Section 9 reports that "serviceability" is not much different to EDSAC I. If marginal tests are passed it can fairly confidently be expected "to operate correctly for the next 12 hours". (LM)
 

Date : 10th July 1958

Physical Description : 1 item (2 pages), paper; typescript

Provenance :
From David Caminer's papers.



Archive References : CMLEO/DC/WF/EDS/9 , DTC/8/16/1-2 , DCMLEO20171126001-002

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH54877. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.
 
Article: 54877 Notes on a Colloquium at Cambridge, 3 Jul 1958

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Lyons
File Size: 1.51 MB






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