Re: You think you had it rough

Article View: alt.folklore.computers

Article #4967

Back to alt.folklore.computers Previous Next

#4967

From: p... Peter Scott
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 1990 17:12

24 lines
2065 bytes

>But I loved the Wang cluster for one reason.  When the CPU overheated,
>as it would tend to do on a hot summer's day, it couldn't quite... MAKE
>IT... arithmetically!  2.0 X 2.0 = .... 3.7236438 or so.  Really!
>Imagine those poor physics schmucks coming in and depending on the
>numbers these things delivered for *non-intuitive* formulae.

I remember the first pocket calculator in England... a Sinclair
that my brother got.  It could add, subtract, multiply and divide!
Later on (when the market was flooded with a dozen or more different
models) I got *my* first calculator: a so-called scientific model,
the Sinclair Scientific.

This piece of genius could do logarithms, which was just as well,
because it didn't have a multiplication function; you added the logs
of the numbers and took the antilog.  It even displayed numbers in
EE notation - unfortunately, it wouldn't display them in anything
else.  And RPN to boot.  Anyway, I recall that it did not threaten our
established method in high school of computing exotic functions like
sines - 4-figure tables - because it only displayed 5 sig. fig., and 2
of those were iffy after a few calculations...

-- 
This is news.  This is your       |    Peter Scott, NASA/JPL/Caltech
brain on news.  Any questions?    |    (p...@aristotle.jpl.nasa.gov)

Technical Details

Message-ID: <1990Oct3.171253.18381@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>

Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aristotle!pjs

References: <1990Oct2.123010.6371@mozart.amd.com> <8725@helios.TAMU.EDU> <15909@bfmny0.BFM.COM>

Show Full Headers

Complete Article Headers

Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aristotle!pjs
From: p...@aristotle.JPL.NASA.gov (Peter Scott)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: You think you had it rough
Message-ID: <1990Oct3.171253.18381@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: 3 Oct 90 17:12:53 GMT
References: <1990Oct2.123010.6371@mozart.amd.com> <8725@helios.TAMU.EDU> <15909@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Sender: ne...@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov (Usenet)
Reply-To: p...@aristotle.jpl.nasa.gov
Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA/Caltech
Lines: 24
Posted: Wed Oct  3 18:12:53 1990
Nntp-Posting-Host: aristotle.jpl.nasa.gov
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Reply to Parent Message