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To: corbe

“Because of its exclusive self-checking features...”

I am from the 2nd generation hardware era as well. Started with IBM in the late 60’s. Coded in 1410/7010 Autocoder, precursor to Assembler, no self correction as far as I knew.


18 posted on 03/26/2014 6:45:24 AM PDT by duckman (I'm part of the group pulling the wagon!)
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To: duckman

I think this refers to the use of a compiler.


21 posted on 03/26/2014 6:52:07 AM PDT by Kirkwood (Zombie Hunter)
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To: duckman

Jeez, I thought that with all the computer geeks here everyone was aware of what UNIVAC was referring to in this ad!

PARITY!

The Excess 3 code included a parity bit, which was used for error checking. This technique was quite new, having been first introduced in 1951 on magnetic tape drives:

http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Univac.dir/


27 posted on 03/26/2014 7:08:27 AM PDT by bigbob (The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. Abraham Lincoln)
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To: duckman
Just a hunch, but I imagine the ‘never makes a mistake’ statement was a garbled attempt by marketing people to describe the use of parity bits in magnetic core memory. It was kind of a big deal back in the old days and improved reliability, but difficult to explain to non-technical people.
29 posted on 03/26/2014 7:19:28 AM PDT by Old North State
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