Speaking

416-621-9348 cgreaves@chrisgreaves.com
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I speak on a wide variety of topics to technical and social groups.

Call me (416) 621-9348 to arrange a schedule.

Title	Content
A Single-Instruction Computer	How a 1967 DECUS symposium paper can change the design of today’s computers.

In 1973 while under contract at the Western Australia Regional Computer Centre I was told of a paper in the 1975 DECUS Spring Joint Computer Conference. The authors were Ants Puust and K. C. Smith of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. At the time I had no idea that ten years later I would be working in Toronto.

The paper discussed the design of a computer with only one instruction, and since I was enrolled in a computer-design course and had written extensively in machine and assembly-level languages, I was fascinated.

I went ahead and built such a machine using FORTRAN on the WARCC Cyber computer, and then simulated a simple computer on the simulated single-instruction computer itself to prove to myself beyond any doubt that the concept could work.

Since I was well-versed in language design, a single-instruction computer seemed to be an excellent vehicle for evaluating end-user languages with a view to optimizing the resources that would be put into building a hardware version of a computer for any end-user language.

Toronto and Mississauga, Monday, December 06, 2010 2:13 PM