December 2024
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
10h 31m
English
One important aspect of Babbage’s Analytical Engine was the fact that instructions and data were stored in very different places. Data were kept in Babbage’s registers made of rotating counters. Instructions were encoded in the holes punched into a train of wooden cards.
This separation of instructions and data made a lot of sense both philosophically and pragmatically. Instructions are verbs. Data are nouns. The data change during execution, but the instructions do not. So they are very obviously different both in nature and intent. Perhaps more importantly, changeable memory was expensive and holes in wooden cards were cheap. A program with hundreds of cards required very little ...
Read now
Unlock full access