When I studied cognitive psychology I remember one of the professors told us about how they had been playing with implementing neurals nets on their PDP11 back in the day. I remember thinking that had to have been be a total waste of time. Silly me.
No backpropagation back then, this only appeared around 1986 with Rumelhart, probably on VAX machines by that time.
The 11/34 was hardly a powerhouse (roughly a turbo XT) but it was sturdy, could handle sustained load and its FPU made the whole difference.
PaulHoule•41m ago
If I remember right that FORTRAN IV compiler really sucked, it used a stack machine and that floating point accelerator "sucked" by normal standards but was actually 100% effective at accelerating that stack machine. The FORTRAN 77 compiler that came latter was better.
jacobgorm•1h ago
rahen•1h ago
No backpropagation back then, this only appeared around 1986 with Rumelhart, probably on VAX machines by that time.
The 11/34 was hardly a powerhouse (roughly a turbo XT) but it was sturdy, could handle sustained load and its FPU made the whole difference.
PaulHoule•41m ago