Computers before silicon-design decisions on Edsac

Edsac (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was designed in 1946 at Cambridge University. The author recalls design decisions on this, one of the earliest electronic computers. The decisions were on three levels: policy, architecture and implementation. The Edsac was a serial machine with an ultrasonic delay memory which used fixed point arithmetic. The clock frequency was 500 kHz to make the circuit engineering easier.<
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