British Science Museum needs a lesson in history

Tony Duell wrote: Except that Zuse's Z3 also had random-access memory, just not for the program. IIRC the Z3 had/has 64 data registers. In fact (as Sellam might remember since this was presented at a speech at last year's VCF) there is a way to give the Z3 random read-only access to its program. The Z3 reads its opcodes from a strip of 35mm movie film; the film can of course be looped together; most importantly the Z3 will _stop_ if it encounters an arithmetic exception. So the "only" work left is to partition the program into sections and explode each arithmetic operation into a conditional operation based on the current value of the section counter. It's possible to do the exploding without causing any more exceptions. I think the section counter needs to go in one of the registers. Hans Franke might know more about this. -- Derek