21–30 of 46 posts
At least the 6502 has a BCD mode built in!
Very impressive, and obviously a labour of love! As a calculator and SystemVerilog enthusiast, it's wonderful to see a project such as this come to fruition - congratulations! I'm holding in my hand a 4-bit Von Neumann Mostek MK50310N that my father and I used to use to build calculators long ago. Although Mostek made chips for HP (such as the HP-35), they weren't commercially available, but the 50310 was. We could o…
Very impressive, and obviously a labour of love! As a calculator and SystemVerilog enthusiast, it's wonderful to see a project such as this come to fruition - congratulations! I'm holding in my hand a 4-bit Von Neumann Mostek MK50310N that my father and I used to use to build calculators long ago. Although Mostek made chips for HP (such as the HP-35), they weren't commercially available, but the 50310 was. We could o…
Re Numworks, at $125 for a calculator, you've got to really love the idea.
I have in my hand (I guess I like using that phase today), my father's original receipt for the HP-45 (it's with the box and manual). $299.00 in 1975, which is $1,850 today(!!!).
Relatively speaking, electronics are very, very cheap today compared to what they used to be. Still appreciate that my $30 CASIO does 90% of that the NumWorks can do, but I'm happy to support upstarts such as NumWorks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you trying to make a pun with byte/bite relating to nibble? Because that's actually where the term nibble (referring to 4 bits) comes from, so I'm not sure such a pun even counts as a pun anymore. Or am I misinterpreting your comment?
When did we stop spelling it "nybble"?
The first book match I get for "nibble" near "byte" is in the 1964 "System 360 Assembler Language" by Don H. Stabley uses nibble. The earliest match I can find for "nybble" in relation to computers was the 1968 "Encyclopedia of library and information science". Nybble (and likely nibble) itself doesn't seem to have taken off until around the mid 1970s https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nybble&year_st...
References to the coining of the term in 1958 of course don't provide a textual source.
are there videos available?
Blog post 6 had an error where the picture of a HP-71B (I have one and used its Forth/Assembler ROM manual to write the first HP-48 ROM decoder) where the caption says it is a 48GX (both used a Saturn CPU).
My dad worked for HP from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s. Needless to say, I used HP calculators in high school and college. The best things about having an HP calculator were the solid physical construction (the buttons on the 11C and 15C were awesome), the accuracy, and the fact that whenever your classmates asked to borrow your calculator they would recoil in horror when you asked them whether they knew RPN.…
"Sure!" (hands over HP-25C)
"Hey, where's the equals key?"
https://baltazarstudios.com/files/calculator-d/Calculator.ht...
https://baltazarstudios.com/files/calculator/Calculator.html
This WebAsm code is compiled using Qt and Verilator so it runs the "hardware" and its microcode inside the simple UI shell that provides the calc interface. In the debug version you can list the ucode, set breakpoints, see regs etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A byte is not always 8 bits on old machines, though it is standardised as 8 bits nowadays. This is why network RFCs talk of "octets", to avoid the ambiguity. Octets are always 8 bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)
The definition of a byte today is different than the definition of byte when those machines were manufactured. Just like how 'foot' is now standardized(*) (* technically, a 'foot' is not a standard unit of measure but that's due to the long history of 'foot' not being standardized until relatively recently)
If the CPU is nibble-oriented, wouldn't that mean that that is its byte size?
A byte is always 8 bits. The word you're looking for is `word-size` which, in this case would be 4 bits.