Software Emulator for the Cardboard
Illustrative Aid to Computation
If you remember Cardiac, then you remember the golden days of the Bell
System. Does anybody remember the Bell System? Does anybody remember
getting just ONE phone bill?
Cardiac was a little cardboard handout designed to help explain how
computers worked. Since it was made of cardboard, you entered decimal
numbers into memory by writing them in the appropriate slots. You could
use pencil for RAM and pen for ROM. Then, you followed the instructions
on the card which told you how to interpret the computer program.
So, it was a little lame. Try selling a 100 milliHertz processor
nowadays. So much for the megaHertz myth. Still, it had a certain ditzy
There is a little documentation for
this program, but you can find out more at the Bell
NOTE: This program makes a slight change to the Cardiac instruction
set, flipping the 0 and 9 opcodes so that the default program halts. (It took forty years of advanced software engineering to come up with this).
Download Cardiac v5