Early programs on the Manchester Mark I Prototype

Author

Shelburne, Brian J. ; Burton, Christopher P.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Math. & Comput. Sci., Wittenberg Univ., Springfield, OH, USA

Volume

20

Issue

3

fYear

1998

Firstpage

4

Lastpage

15

Abstract

The Manchester Mark I Prototype (or Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM, as it was officially known) is generally recognized as the first stored-program computer to successfully execute a program. The SSEM was a simple machine with only seven instructions (its only arithmetic operation was subtraction) and 32 words of 32-bit memory. Two of the men primarily responsible for the SSEM, Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn, published a letter in the 25 September 1948 issue of Nature describing the SSEM along with a summary of three programs that were run on it: long division, finding the greatest common divisor of two integers, and finding the largest factor of an integer. Given the very limited capabilities of the SSEM, the authors set out to discover how all three programs were actually coded

Keywords

digital arithmetic; digital computers; history; Manchester Mark I Prototype; SSEM; Small-Scale Experimental Machine; early programs; greatest common divisor finding; instructions; integers; largest integer factor; long division; program coding; stored-program computer; Arithmetic; Decision support systems; Prototypes; Virtual reality;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1058-6180

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/85.707570

Filename

707570