Computer Learning

[lostcowboy]

I had forgotten about the bootstrap program! A computer is such a baby, before you get a program into it. It doesn't know how to read the tape reader to input the program, you needed a program to do that. The memory in that first computer was a temperature stabilized non volatile random access memory. The memory was made up of these magnetic rings with x and y wires wrapped around them. You normally needed current in both wires to flip the state of the magnet. The boot-strap was a program that was hard wired into the memory by a third wire. What you would do is clear the memory, then hit the boot-strap switch. The computer now knows how to read 5 bit paper tape, you then had to load a program to read 8 bit paper tape, than you could load the satellite tracking program. Which ran in three parts as the computers memory was to small.