Programming
Harvest's most important mode of operation was called 'setup' mode, in which the processor was configured (with several hundred bits of information) and the processor then operated by streaming data from memory (possibly taking two streams from memory) and writing a separate stream back to memory. The two byte streams could be combined, used to find data in tables, or counted to determine the frequency of various values. A value could be anything from 1 to 16 contiguous bits, without regard to alignment, and the streams could be as simple as data laid out in memory, or data read repeatedly, under the control of multiply nested "do"-loop descriptors which were interpreted by the hardware.
Two programming languages, Alpha and Beta (not be confused with Simula-inspired BETA programming language) were designed for programming it, and IBM provided a compiler for the former around the time the machine was delivered.
Read more about this topic: IBM 7950 Harvest
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