On 3/17/23 06:25, Paul Koning wrote: > > I'm still trying to get a good answer to "when did the first commercial (as > opposed to one-off lab) computer appear that had interrupts as a standard > feature?" > > It looks like there was the IBM 704, in 1958, with interrupts but some > documentation made me think it was an optional feature. The other machine > from 1958 I can think of is the Electrologica X1. That is the machine that > confronted Dijkstra with the need to develop new theory to deal with the > non-sequential behavior of machines with interrupts, and his Ph.D. thesis was > the result. The X1 is also interesting in that it has what much later would > be called a BIOS -- a ROM-resident software library that included I/O > services including dealing with interrupts, an assembler/loader, and an > operator interface. Dijkstra wrote that, and the source code is in an > appendix of his thesis. >
I assume that you've seen Mark Smotherman's paper on this. UNIVAC seems to hold the distinction. https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/interrupts.html --Chuck
