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A project log for AMBAP: A Modest Bitslice Architecture Proposal

Trying to unify and simplify a minimal architecture for various implementation technologies...

yann-guidon-ygdesYann Guidon / YGDES 12/14/2018 at 19:440 Comments

ENIAC is often credited for being "the first calculator" but "real computers"  emerged very soon afterwards, following the famous "Von Neumann report". Today, I just found details about the WhirlWind : https://medium.com/chmcore/the-whirlwind-computer-at-chm-dab505bc52a6  and the structure is "very interesting" !

This means that the "bitslice" organisation can be traced back to the late 1940s, because each of the 16 racks would implement one bit of the datapath, gathering one bit from each register and the ALU. There are now many, many diagrams in this report : www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/whirlwind/R-series/R-127_Whirlwind_I_Computer_Block_Diagrams_Volume_2_Sep47.pdf It "feels" particularly modern and reads easily, using pretty standard conventions and using very well known structures.

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