Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
branching called “jumps”, which allowed it to skip to a desired instruction. The device
was capable of using a form of microcoding by using the position of studs on a metal
barrel called the “control barrel” to interpret instructions. This machine could calculate
an addition or subtraction operation in about three seconds, and a multiplication or
division operation in about three minutes.
In 1843, Augusta Ada Byron (1815 - 1852), Lady
Lovelace, mathematician, scientist and daughter of the
famed poet Lord Byron, translated an article from
French about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, adding her
own notes. Ada composed a plan for the calculation of
Bernoulli numbers, which is considered to be the first
ever “computer program.” Though because it was
never built, the algorithm was never run on Analytical
Engine. In 1979, the U.S. Department of Defense
honored the world’s first “computer programmer” by
naming its own software development language as
“Ada.” viii
George Boole (1815 -
1864) (right) wrote, "An
Investigation of the Laws
of Thought, on Which Are
Founded the Mathematical
Theories of Logic and Probabilities" in 1854. This article
detailed Boole’s new binary approach, which processed only
two objects at a time (in a yes-no, true-false, on-off, zero-one
type manner), to logic by incorporating it into mathematics
and reducing it to a simple algebra, which presented an
analogy between symbols that represent logical forms and
algebraic symbols. Three primary operations were defined based on those in Set Theory:
AND—intersection, OR—union, and NOT—compliment. This system was the
beginning of the Boolean algebra that is the basis for many applications in modern
electronic circuits and computation. ix Though his idea was either ignored or criticized by
many of his peers, twelve years later, an American, Charles Sanders Peirce, described it
to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He spent the next twenty years
expanding and modifying the idea, eventually designing a basic electrical logic-circuit.
Processing and storage were not the only advancements
made prior to the 20 th century. There were also great
improvements in communications technology. Samuel
13