Comment by snailmailman

I think it goes back further than 1998. Several old systems had special memory locations where the numbers written would then read back changed. The Apollo Guidance computer for instance didn’t have a shift-right or shift-left cpu instruction. They would write data to a specific area of memory that would modify the data to shift bits around.

Although I’m sure it’s quite different. The cpu and memory hardware is so completely different. And basic bit manipulation is hardly computation.