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Setting-up early computer programs: D. H. Lehmer’s ENIAC computation

2009; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s00153-009-0169-8

1432-0665

Maarten Bullynck, Liesbeth De Mol,

Cybernetics and Technology in Society

A complete reconstruction of Lehmer’s ENIAC set-up for computing the exponents of p modulo two is given. This program served as an early test program for the ENIAC (1946). The reconstruction illustrates the difficulties of early programmers to find a way between a man operated and a machine operated computation. These difficulties concern both the content level (the algorithm) and the formal level (the logic of sequencing operations).