ENIAC programming Was: release dates of early microcomputer operating systems, incl. Intel ISIS

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave Wade

    > Crispin Rope concentrates on the power of ENIAC and its usefulness

Which is why you should look at the longer, later article:

  http://eniacinaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EngineeringTheMiracleoftheENIAC-scanned.pdf

in particular the part I pointed out (bottom right corner of pg. 51), which
talks about all the things that can be found in that early ENIAC code, e.g.
subroutine calls with storage of return point, etc.

I am far less interested in the comparison with other machines (in that
article) than I am with the enumeration of what the 'program ENIAC' _itself_
could do - which seems to have been quite a lot.

    > to me a "computer" without self-modifying code is a programmable
    > calculator even if it has index registers... 

So a modern Harvard-architecture machine (e.g. AMD29K) with only ROM on the
instruction bus is a programmable calculator? 

It's precisely that hypothetical which leads me to conclude that the fact
that the 'program ENIAC' only had ROM for its code (actually, technically,
that's quite not true - it could execute programs stored on cards, too) is
not that important; I think the thing to look at is what its programs could
contain.

	Noel