On Sunday, October 11, 2020, 1:40:30 AM EDT, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
There are some glorious YouTube videos of Grace Hopper showing the wide paper-tape containing the programming, and how she had to literally patch it (cover holes, add holes, etc).
Very cool! I'll have to look those up after VCF.
I vaguely remember her mentioning how it was an early form of parallel processing: calculations could be run simultaneously on each functional unit
Yes. In the early documentation, they refer to it as interposition. The manual has a wonderful quote: "in order to attain the maximum speed of computation, full advantage must be taken of the methods of interposition." The Mark I really was quite an interesting machine. BLS