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Weisbecker's System 00 computer. (Courtesy of the David Sarnoff
Library, photograph by Z. Stachniak.)
computer into hobbyists' and children's hands as possible,” said
Joyce Weisbecker. β€œIn this sense, even his 'computer' topics (the
one that played Tic-Tac-Toe against you and the one that read
your mind) were early versions of FRED , as were Think-A-Dot
[computer toy] and the Computer Coin Games book.” 5
As a hardware concept, FRED went through a number of
design phases due to the technological realities at RCA . Its first
incarnation was the System 00 built by Weisbecker in 1971
at RCA Labs in Princeton, NJ . Its design called for the FRED
microprocessor, an 8-bit single-chip processor capable of dir-
ectly accessing 64K of memory. Weisbecker designed the micro-
processor in 1971 and originally presented its architecture in
the RCA technical report An Eight-Bit Micro-Processor . The
FRED microprocessor was more capable than any of the micro-
processors being developed at Intel at that time. Unfortunately
for Weisbecker, in 1971 RCA did not have the technology to
 
 
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