Happy 65th Anniversary to Computer Software

Friday marked the 65th anniversary of the first use of random access memory to run a stored program. Prior to the testing of ‘Baby’ as the computer was called, all programs were recalled by using mechanical means or paper tape. ‘Baby’ had an astounding storage capacity of 1024 bits. We’ve come a long way, ‘Baby’.

The system wasn’t developed to be a full scale computational tool but, was rather a proof of concept system in a bid to show that new form of memory was reliable.

Click to expand...

Good think code was written a lot more efficiently back then

Anyone remember "core" RAM?

It was a bunch of tiny donut-shaped magnets in a 100x100 grid? with three wires going through them. X, Y, and an angled one to hold the state. They were about 10 inches square.

I threw one away when I was cleaning up 25 years ago. I regret that. It looked bad ass.

Machine language! The real way to program!

Assembler x86 is ManCode.

Lotus 1-2-3 was 111,000 bytes (spreadsheet software written in asm).

Today's Microsoft Mouse driver is 47,000,000 bytes written in C++.

Mouse drivers were under 2,000 bytes when written in asm.