Simon (computer)

Extremely limited computer released in 1950, intended as an educational demonstration of the concepts behind digital computers

Simon was a relay-based electromechanical computer, described by Edmund Berkeley in a series of thirteen construction articles in Radio-Electronics magazine, from October 1950. Intended for the educational purpose of demonstrating the concept of a digital computer, it could not be used for any significant practical computation since it handled only two-bit numbers (values 0 through 3) and had only 32 bits (16 two-bit registers) of memory.

Nº Q2287343 ★

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Simon (computer)

Extremely limited computer released in 1950, intended as an educational demonstration of the concepts behind digital computers

Simon was a relay-based electromechanical computer, described by Edmund Berkeley in a series of thirteen construction articles in Radio-Electronics magazine, from October 1950. Intended for the educational purpose of demonstrating the concept of a digital computer, it could not be used for any significant practical computation since it handled only two-bit numbers (values 0 through 3) and had only 32 bits (16 two-bit registers) of memory.

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From Wikipedia

Simon was a relay-based electromechanical computer, described by Edmund Berkeley in a series of thirteen construction articles in Radio-Electronics magazine, from October 1950. Intended for the educational purpose of demonstrating the concept of a digital computer, it could not be used for any significant practical computation since it handled only two-bit numbers (values 0 through 3) and had only 32 bits (16 two-bit registers) of memory. A working model was first built by two graduate students at Columbia University for less than US$300 ($3,650 in 2022 dollars) in parts. Some have described it as the "first personal computer", although its extremely limited capacity and its unsuitability for use for any purpose other than as an educational demonstration make that classification questionable.

Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0. · Image: ArnoldReinhold (CC BY-SA 4.0) ·

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