Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. Surmising from some personal experience that writing mathematical programs is hard even now, although there exist certain functional paradigms, and specialised environments such as MATLAB or Mathematica. The complexity seems to remain the same if not more now, due to the vast oodles of data to handle stemming from the nature of the world.
Were they loaded as just words as any other instruction or were there separate coprocessors that did the number crunching? I'm guessing Fortran-ish kind of implementations were done, but the hardware level computation itself I just can't process.
It just blows my mind now thinking backwards in terms of those monster machines being loaded with trails of paper tape instructions to play Space Travel. Being born in the late 90's doesn't help me too.
Also, on a related note, don't know if you've watched the
interview of Ken done by Brian at the Vintage Comptuer Federation 2019, there might be a few surprises lurking around the middle of that when they discuss pipes and grep.
Thank you!