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Spotted at Andrew Plotkin's blog is an interesting article on the two word control panel in the original Apollo Guidance Computer, which talks about the use of "VERB" and "NOUN" controls on the original instrument panel.
This then links to a Discover Magazine Article How Verbs and Nouns Got Apollo to the Moon, which describes how the Apollo astronauts interacted with the guidance computer by:
[...] entering Noun-Verb combination commands in lieu of a string of written words. To keep it simple, the commands were written out in short hand. For example, V37N31E stood for Verb 37 Noun 31 and Enter to get the program running.
[...] It might not seem like it, but the Noun-Verb arrangement and verbiage comes from the fact that the computer engineers who built and used the Apollo guidance computer were also inventing it as they went along. They didn't have backgrounds in computer engineering because the field didn't exist then as it does today. But they all spoke English, so carrying over the same language structure simplified things for everyone. It's a perfect example of the brilliant simplicity that went into so much engineering of the Apollo era.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday September 01 2017, @04:56PM (1 child)
Already assembly knows multiple operands, for example on Z80 (a quite old 8-bit processor): ld b,d Here ld is the verb (load), b is the first noun (the b register), and d is the second noun (the d register).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @08:26PM
Z80 even had a search instruction, taking as its operands the target value and a memory range to search for the value.