The TX-2 was a
transistor-based computer using the then-huge amount of 64
K 36-bit words of
magnetic-core memory. The TX-2 became operational in 1958. Because of its powerful capabilities,
Ivan Sutherland's revolutionary
Sketchpad program was developed for and ran on the TX-2. One of its key features was the ability to directly interact with the computer through a graphical display. The TX-2 had 32 modes of
predication, innovative
bitmanipulation instructions and is likely one of the very first processors with
SIMD within a register, used in Sutherland's Sketchpad: ...the Lincoln Lab’s TX-2 computer offered instructions that operated on the ALU as either one 36-bit operation, two 18-bit operations, or four 9-bit operations... Sketchpad did in fact take advantage of these SIMD instructions, despite TX-2 appearing before invention of the term SIMD. The
compiler (today we would say
assembler) was developed by
Lawrence Roberts while he was studying at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. In 1964 the TX-2 was extended with the APEX
time-sharing system. This included a hardware
memory-management unit named SPAN which employed
thin-film memory. == Relationship with DEC ==