Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
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Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
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Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#2I jumped into reading this note without looking at the url or author and near the end I was wondering who wrote it -- Then I saw the reference to the SPI driver which was a dead give away for James Bowman. I am continuously impressed with his work in the embedded scene after discovering the gameduino. It feels like even though there are thousands of voices on the web I actually only care about what perhaps 50 people are writing.
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#3I don't think many people realize that Woz's dad was an electrical engineer at Lockheed who would bring home computer manuals that Woz would read as a kid.
This seems to be a fairly effective way to create world-changing computer engineers.
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#4I learned to program on a 6502 when I was younger - it's a little depressing that computers went and got so fast that there's no real justification for doing this sort of thing any more in almost any domain (except, I guess, if you manage to land a position developing embedded I2C drivers).
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#5> They took the limitations of their computers as a challenge, sat down, and made these tiny machines do impressive things.
Poets knew from long ago that using pentameter and constraints fosters creativity. Here we see the same principle applied in computing.
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#6> They took the limitations of their computers as a challenge, sat down, and made these tiny machines do impressive things. Poets knew from long ago that using pentameter and constraints fosters creativity. Here we see the same principle applied in computing.
The craft/art still exists in the demoscene
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#7I learned to program on a 6502 when I was younger - it's a little depressing that computers went and got so fast that there's no real justification for doing this sort of thing any more in almost any domain (except, I guess, if you manage to land a position developing embedded I2C drivers).
Yes but there are new primitive domains to master, like driving a motor with an arduino, or programming FPGAs.
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#8I don't think many people realize that Woz's dad was an electrical engineer at Lockheed who would bring home computer manuals that Woz would read as a kid. This seems to be a fairly effective way to create world-changing computer engineers.
Breeding?
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#9I don't think many people realize that Woz's dad was an electrical engineer at Lockheed who would bring home computer manuals that Woz would read as a kid. This seems to be a fairly effective way to create world-changing computer engineers.
Regression tends to the mean. Imagine what Apple might have been if Woz's dad had been in the factory!
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#10Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online.
I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.)
I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s.
Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a complete board schematic at lunch, then getting the working board back from mfg. the following week and launching it on the Space Shuttle.