[AnimalMuppet]

Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.

[DaleBiagio]

That's a fascinating detail! Do you know which machine?

The transition period where patch cables and stored programs coexisted is one of the most interesting eras in computing history.

[AnimalMuppet]

I do not know. I think it was before she first got an assembler. Memory was still tubes, not core.

I kind of think she was at White Sands at the time, so... maybe look at what White Sands was using for missile trajectory calculations around 1954 or 1955?

[adrian_b]

Perhaps one of the IBM 60x programmable calculator series, which were widely used.