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jamesharttoday at 5:06 PM1 replyview on HN

‘Stored program’ is where the debate is. Colossus was ‘programmable’ but the program was not a series of instructions executed in a sequence - it was a single data process executed on the input data against a set of stored registers.

Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.


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dborehamtoday at 9:16 PM

Having seen the replica, I noticed it has a long continuous tape loop. Was the program "stored" in the paper tape?

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