An interesting claim: Olivetti made the first ever PC, in 1962

On 3/6/2012 11:08 PM, dwight elvey wrote: Dwight, the feature that separated it from just a programmable calculator was that it could compute and store program steps on the fly. I wrote programs specifically to do that. One entered the programs as a series of steps, and you lost storage registers as you added program steps. However you could calculate the location of a program step and carefully modify it. It isn't much, but I think that tips it over into a really small computer with stored program. The cards were for backup, and reusable which was quite a feature in the days of punched cards. the Wangs that came later had only the card reader, and you typing to program it. Anyone recall whether it could generate program steps on the fly or not? I don't recall ever seeing anyone do it. I don't defend it as useful on a machine with effectively 64 locations total (48 years dulls the memory) and only used it to prove the capability. Jim