Veniac Resources
VENIAC (which stands for Velociraptor Edna's Numerical Instruction Automatic Computer) is a fictional computer architecture created just for the book Science Comics: Computers. Unlike normal computers, Veniac is a decimal architecture, not binary, and instead of being electronic, consists of an irritable Velociraptor named Edna Greenspun and some very basic tools she has around her office.
Nonetheless, Veniac is a real computer, and it can do the things other computers can do. It’s just simpler for a beginner to understand.
This hub will gather resources for exploring the Veniac computer beyond what is in the book, including documentation and a simulator (so you can run Veniac programs at home).
Veniac Simulator
The browser-based simulator is still under construction. Once ready, there will be links for it on this page.
Architecture Reference
This will be a detailed description of the entire Veniac architecture and machine language.
Veniac Tutorial
We’ll also have a less formal tutorial on Veniac available.
DSCII
Computers natively only understand numbers. They need character encodings to represent glyphs like letters, digits, punctuation and the like that make up text. Real computers use codes like ASCII or Unicode.
Veniac is a decimal architecture and has its own character encoding called the Dinosaurian Standard Code for Information Interchange, or DSCII for short.
A DSCII table lives on the DSCII reference page so you can translate between characters and DSCII codes at a glance.