OT-Square Root Day

[Retired]

Yes, that's true for "states", as in either/or; but not for "counts". It's still 2 (10 in binary) kinds of people.

[Paintedcow]

Ascii Text

Go to:

Put the binary numbers into "INPUT DATA" Select (under CONVERT) "Binary nimbers to text" Click on "Output" Wait a few seconds and see the results.

[gfretwell]

Is this ASCII, Hex or what? They do not convert the same.

... and no I am not doing it.

[gfretwell]

In those days bits were stored in magnetic cores and they were hand laced into the array. A core plane with 1000 bits on it was considered big. (typically stacked 16 high for a 16k array, with a 2 byte data path.) In 1965 we were already transistors on chips (s/360) but the discrete transistor on card design had been around for several years. (70xx,

14xx)

BTW the prototype 370 m145 was still using M2I core storage arrays. IBM made 10 of them and we ended up with #00001 and #00002 in the DC area.

[gfretwell]

But you are only talking about states (people who know and people who don't) we are not counting all of the people who exist in each state.

You would not be so caviler about wasting bits if you only had 4k or

8k to work with. ;-)

We have evolved so far from true binary that most programmers never even get close to bits.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

Once I found a book by someone suggesting that ternary was the best possible way to write numerals, and everyone should use it.

IIRC it had to do with 3 being the closest whole number to e .

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

Expressing the number of digits used in a particular radix, will always take more digit (it will be 10 in that radix).

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I never actually got to use core memory, but I did get to see some in college. It looked like a piece of thick black cloth.

BTW, IIRC reading a core could actually change what was stored in it.

[snip]

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I used to have a Commodore-64 computer. I wrote a BASIC language expansion (called BASIC PLUS) which really added a lot of stuff, but still fit in 8KB ($8000 - $9FFF, either RAM or ROM cartridge).

[snip]

[Cindy Hamilton]

te:

If you're looking for dissent, you won't get any from me.

Cindy Hamilton

[gfretwell]

Reading a core erased it so you had to have circuitry to rewrite it or change it. You sent a pulse to flip it and then sensed whether it flipped or not. The cores are strung in a matrix with an X and Y wire going through each one. If there is current on both wires, it will flip the core, if it is only in one wire it will not flip. The material is carefully selected to have a very high hysteresis so it will work that way.

[gfretwell]

Even well up into the S/360 days, it was common to only have an 8k partition to run some very sophisticated business applications. I had a mens clothing retailer that was running a credit card authorization app with 6 operators and 2 batch partitions for regular accounting and inventory jobs in addition to the OS in 24k and that was in the 1970-72 timeframe.

[Stormin Mormon]

I did so. Totally fascinating. Glad I did, it was fun. Thank you.

[Stormin Mormon]

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