The title says "Wozniac" but it really should be with a final "k", as in "Wozniak".
Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
11–20 of 182 posts
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#12As a senior Java / CPP developer, reading what Wozniak had written, it might have been some incantation in a forgotten language.
I really wish I had done more embedded and assembly at school. I can't understand it or appreciate it.
Maybe SW and HW shouldn't mix, bar a few visionaries who bridge both worlds?
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#13Having written a lot of 8 bit assembler for the 6800 microprocessor for 2K eproms, I can attest it is a very different skill from writing modern software.
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#14Woz 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 compl…
A 50-hour pilot in a Bonanza A36TC is insane, I had no idea Woz landed off-airport. I do checkouts in Bonanzas, and the more typical A36TC/TN pilot has 500 hours' experience or more.
(Some of us still use small planes like ATVs -- but if the description of Woz' experience in the incident is accurate, this is like taking a Lamborghini out with a fresh driving permit)
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple-history-stev...
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#15As a senior Java / CPP developer, reading what Wozniak had written, it might have been some incantation in a forgotten language. I really wish I had done more embedded and assembly at school. I can't understand it or appreciate it. Maybe SW and HW shouldn't mix, bar a few visionaries who bridge both worlds?
Why should SW and HW not mix?
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#16I 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.
If you gave computer manuals to kids today, they'd cry and beg for their phones back
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#17As a senior Java / CPP developer, reading what Wozniak had written, it might have been some incantation in a forgotten language. I really wish I had done more embedded and assembly at school. I can't understand it or appreciate it. Maybe SW and HW shouldn't mix, bar a few visionaries who bridge both worlds?
play the zachtronics games if you want a taste of it.
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#18I 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.
If you gave computer manuals to kids today, they'd cry and beg for their phones back
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Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#19> 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.
This is what I love about the C256 project (https://c256foenix.com/). From an interview with her:
By limiting its resources, future developers will have to be clever to find new ways to create amazing things that early on we thought we could never do. Memory is cheap, so I could easily spend the same amount of money on a single chip that could have given me the chance to fill the memory space with RAM. But instead, I am choosing to use many chips with much lower capacity. It’s more limiting, but that’s the point."
Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
#20I 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.
If you gave computer manuals to kids today, they'd cry and beg for their phones back
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