8 Mar
2018
8 Mar
'18
9:11 a.m.
I'm curious as to the origin of the exch/swap instruction in computer instruction sets. Does anyone know the first computer having such an instruction? I'm not interested in the modern "compare-and-swap" type of instruction, which seems to have originated with Maurice Herlihy, but the original, non-conditional type. Yes, early computer scientists (before they were called that!) loved these instructions because they allowed for clever algorithms like a stackless GC algorithm.