Volvelleteer

Cardiac


Software Emulator for the Cardboard
Illustrative Aid to Computation

Cardiac


If you remember Cardiac, then you remember the golden days of the Bell System. Does anybody remember the Bell System? Does anybody remember getting just ONE phone bill?

Cardiac was a little cardboard handout designed to help explain how computers worked. Since it was made of cardboard, you entered decimal numbers into memory by writing them in the appropriate slots. You could use pencil for RAM and pen for ROM. Then, you followed the instructions on the card which told you how to interpret the computer program.

So, it was a little lame. Try selling a 100 milliHertz processor nowadays. So much for the megaHertz myth. Still, it had a certain ditzy charm.


Documentation

There is a little documentation for this program, but you can find out more at the Bell System Memorial.

NOTE: This program makes a slight change to the Cardiac instruction set, flipping the 0 and 9 opcodes so that the default program halts. (It took forty years of advanced software engineering to come up with this).


Download Cardiac v5

You will need Stuffit Expander to decompress these files.

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