Lawrence J. Krakauer's decimal computer

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Lawrence J. Krakauer's decimal computer was an educational language invented after 1965 for teaching programming to children in a camp. It was implemented as an emulator on a PDP-1 machine.

The computer has a memory of 1000 words, each a four-digit positive number. Instructions are one word each, with a one digit opcode and a three-digit address or operand field. The computer can do simple arithmetic instructions on the one-word accumulator and a memory operand. It also has a jump and a conditional skip instruction, the latter skips if the comparison is equal. Indirect memory access is done using a code-modifying instruction that writes into the address field of an instruction. There are also custom IO devices defined.

• “My emulated decimal computer” by Lawrence J. Krakauer (from the Wayback Machine; retrieved on 24 May 2013)