Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Weisbecker's System 00 computer. (Courtesy of the David Sarnoff
Library, photograph by Z. Stachniak.)
computer into hobbyists' and children's hands as possible,β said
Joyce Weisbecker. βIn 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
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