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Comment by jcmeyrignac | Hacker News Reader

In France in 1982, the magazine Science & Vie published a cardboard computer simulator, named "Ordinapoche". It was designed by Joel de Rosnay. Here is a cached copy in french: https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...

It helped me understand computers!

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This in is a tradition of earlier simulated ("cardboard") computers such as the 1965 "Little Man Computer" or the 1968 CARDIAC. Like Ordinapoche, they were basically aids to help a person step through a machine language program, with the person performing the low-level actions themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_man_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_...

"What do you call it when you're prosecuted for illegally importing cardboard computers?"

"CARDIAC arrest (ba-dum tsss)"

Yes, very funny. But they knew what they were doing when they named it that. There was a series of early computers named ILLIAC (because they were created at the University of Illinois and after ENIAC, a famous computer that was "the first" digital programmable computer by some definitions of those words). The illiac artery connects to the heart, so CARDIAC makes sense (also of course, it was made of cardboard)

Do you have another link? my mobile safari gots into infinite redirects.

The page contents: https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?inframe=1&url=h...

Had to disable JS to get the frame URL and load that instead.

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