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Monroe Epic
The Monroe EPIC was a programmable calculator that came on the market in the 1960s. It consisted of a large desktop unit which attached to a floor-standing logic tower and was capable of being programmed to perform many computer-like functions. However, the only form of a branching instruction available was a hard-coded unconditional branch (GOTO) that always executed at program Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to: Business and management * Program management, the process of managing several related projects * Time management * Program, a part of planning Arts and entertainment Audio * Progra ... completion (the end of the operation stack) to return to the starting instruction of the program (looped back to the beginning of operation stack). This made the creation of conditional branching logic, such as IF-THEN-ELSE, impossible. References External linksOld Calculators Museum Images of the Monroe Epic [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Programmable Calculator
Programmable calculators are calculators that can automatically carry out a sequence of operations under control of a stored program. Most are Turing complete, and, as such, are theoretically general-purpose computers. However, their user interfaces and programming environments are specifically tailored to make performing small-scale numerical computations convenient, rather than general-purpose use. The first programmable calculators such as the IBM CPC used punched cards or other media for program storage. Hand-held electronic calculators store programs on magnetic strips, removable read-only memory cartridges, flash memory, or in battery-backed read/write memory. Since the early 1990s, most of these flexible handheld units belong to the class of graphing calculators. Before the mass-manufacture of inexpensive dot-matrix LCDs, however, programmable calculators usually featured a one-line numeric or alphanumeric display. The Big Four manufacturers of programmable calcu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Desktop Computer
A desktop computer (often abbreviated desktop) is a personal computer designed for regular use at a single location on or near a desk due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply, motherboard (a printed circuit board with a microprocessor as the central processing unit, memory, bus, certain peripherals and other electronic components), disk storage (usually one or more hard disk drives, solid state drives, optical disc drives, and in early models a floppy disk drive); a keyboard and mouse for input; and a computer monitor, speakers, and, often, a printer for output. The case may be oriented horizontally or vertically and placed either underneath, beside, or on top of a desk. Personal computers with their cases oriented vertically are referred to as towers. As the majority of cases offered since the mid-1990s are in this form factor, the term ''desktop'' has been retronymically used to refer to modern cases of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Branch (computer Science)
A branch is an instruction in a computer program that can cause a computer to begin executing a different instruction sequence and thus deviate from its default behavior of executing instructions in order. ''Branch'' (or ''branching'', ''branched'') may also refer to the act of switching execution to a different instruction sequence as a result of executing a branch instruction. Branch instructions are used to implement control flow in program loops and conditionals (i.e., executing a particular sequence of instructions only if certain conditions are satisfied). A branch instruction can be either an ''unconditional branch'', which always results in branching, or a ''conditional branch'', which may or may not cause branching depending on some condition. Also, depending on how it specifies the address of the new instruction sequence (the "target" address), a branch instruction is generally classified as ''direct'', ''indirect'' or ''relative'', meaning that the instruction contai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hard Coding
Hard coding (also hard-coding or hardcoding) is the software development practice of embedding data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, as opposed to obtaining the data from external sources or generating it at runtime. Hard-coded data typically can only be modified by editing the source code and recompiling the executable, although it can be changed in memory or on disk using a debugger or hex editor. Data that are hard-coded is best for unchanging pieces of information, such as physical constants, version numbers and static text elements. Softcoded data, on the other hand, encode arbitrary information through user input, text files, INI files, HTTP server responses, configuration files, preprocessor macros, external constants, databases, command-line arguments, and are determined at runtime. Overview Hard coding requires the program's source code to be changed any time the input data or desired format changes, when it might be more conven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code. Source code needs another computer program to execute because computers can only execute their native machine instructions. Therefore, source code may be translated to machine instructions using the language's compiler. (Assembly language programs are translated using an assembler.) The resulting file is called an executable. Alternatively, source code may execute within the language's interpreter. If the executable is requested for execution, then the operating system loads it into memory and starts a process. The central processing unit will soon switch to this process so it can fetch, decode, and then execute each machine instruction. If the source code is requested for executio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stack (abstract Data Type)
In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two main operations: * Push, which adds an element to the collection, and * Pop, which removes the most recently added element that was not yet removed. Additionally, a peek operation can, without modifying the stack, return the value of the last element added. Calling this structure a ''stack'' is by analogy to a set of physical items stacked one atop another, such as a stack of plates. The order in which an element added to or removed from a stack is described as last in, first out, referred to by the acronym LIFO. As with a stack of physical objects, this structure makes it easy to take an item off the top of the stack, but accessing a datum deeper in the stack may require taking off multiple other items first. Considered as a linear data structure, or more abstractly a sequential collection, the push and pop operations occur only at one end of the structure, referred t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conditional (computer Programming)
In computer science, conditionals (that is, conditional statements, conditional expressions and conditional constructs,) are programming language commands for handling decisions. Specifically, conditionals perform different computations or actions depending on whether a programmer-defined boolean ''condition'' evaluates to true or false. In terms of control flow, the decision is always achieved by selectively altering the control flow based on some condition (apart from the case of branch predication). Although dynamic dispatch is not usually classified as a conditional construct, it is another way to select between alternatives at runtime. Terminology In imperative programming languages, the term "conditional statement" is usually used, whereas in functional programming, the terms "conditional expression" or "conditional construct" are preferred, because these terms all have distinct meanings. If–then(–else) The if–then construct (sometimes called if–then–e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
