▲ | adrian_b 7 days ago | |
The Harvard Mark I and its successors, and especially the IBM SSEC were "stored program general purpose computers". Mark I was an electro-mechanical computer, while SSEC was hybrid, including both electro-mechanical parts and parts with vacuum tubes. For a few years, IBM's SSEC was the world's most powerful "supercomputer", and it has solved a great number of diverse problems. SSEC had some advanced features that have been introduced in fully electronic computers only about a decade later, e.g. pipelined instruction execution (to compensate for its slow circuits). What you mean is that none of your examples was a von Neumann computer, i.e. where there is a common memory for program storage and data storage, enabling the computer to create or modify programs by itself. Obviously the common memory was an essential element for the evolution of electronic computers, enabling many features that were impossible when the programs were stored separately, on a ROM such as punched tape. However, saying just "stored program" also covers the case when the program is stored in a separate ROM, as it may still be the case for a microcontroller, though nowadays most of them store the program in an alterable flash memory. |