Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
Between 1964 and 1965, DEC
introduced the PDP-8 (left)—the
world’s first minicomputer. It
contained transistor-based circuitry
modules and was mass-produced for
the commercial market—the first
computer sold as a retail product.
During its initial offering at $18,000,
it was the smallest and least
expensive available parallel generalpurpose
computer. By 1973, the
PDP-8, described as the “Model T”
of the computer industry, was the
best selling computer in the world.
They had 12-bit words, usually with 4K words of memory, a robust instruction set and
could run at room temperature. xlii
In 1965, Maurice V. Wilkes proposes the use of cache memory—a smaller, faster, more
expensive type of memory that hold a copy of part of main memory. Access to entities in
cache memory is much faster than that in main memory, which leads to better system
performance. The same year, Intel founder Gordon Moore proposed that the number of
transistors on microchips would double every year. The prediction was valid and came to
be known as Moore’s Law. Consider that a chip in 1964 that was 2½ cm 2 had ten
components and a chip in 1970 of the same size had about 1000.
In 1967, Donald Knuth produced some of the work that would become “The Art of
Computer Programming”. He introduced the idea that a computer program’s algorithms
and data structures should be treated as different entities than the program itself, which
has greatly improved computer programming. Volume 1 of The Art of Computer
Programming was published in 1968.
In 1967, Niklaus Wirth began to develop the Pascal structured programming language.
The Pascal Standard (ISO 7185) states that it was intended to:
• “make available a language suitable for teaching programming as a systematic
discipline based on fundamental concepts clearly and naturally reflected by the
language”
• “to define a language whose implementations could be both reliable and efficient
on then-available computers” xliii
49