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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

#131

Post by vanderZwan »

iainmerrick wrote: post #123

I was always very impressed by the floating point routines in BBC Basic (also on the 6502). Anyone know who wrote those, and if they were derived from this work by Rankin and Wozniak? BBC Basic is the best all-round Basic of its era that I know of, with rich control flow features, proper recursion and built-in assembler. But I don't know how much was original work from Acorn and how much was borrowed from elsewhere.…

Sophie Wilson apparently did most of the BBC Basic implementation, no idea if that also included the floating point routines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#132

Post by [deleted] »

nocman wrote: post #70
naikrovek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people were scary good at these things early on. Not everyone was as good as Woz, of course. When you can fit the entire architecture into your head, all the way down to the chips and board layout, you'll find that you're capable of quite a lot on that platform. A human with a skillet that has scaled up as much as computing hardware has scaled up is going to be virtually impossible to find, if not actually im…

"A human with a skillet" -- oh, I'm guessing skillset is what you meant to say. I was feeling old and thinking I was ignorant of some new slang there for a few seconds. :-D

[deleted]

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#133

Post by bluedino »

dekhn wrote: post #3

I 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.

My boss's son is like that. He has brought him into the office since he was a kid, he's 22 now and content to go home and read PLC manuals and such. He doesn't have any social skills and doesn't really interact with anyone except 2-3 people from work, it's kind of sad.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#134

Post by DanielBMarkham »

barrkel wrote: post #126
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airplanes are a great hobby for people who need to get out of the office, love traveling, and need a hobby that has a lot of little detailed things to stay on top of. Flying real IMC to minimums in a small plane is like solving a real-time fluid dynamics/trig problem, where if you fail, you die. I guess there are people who do it for the danger, but the beauty of it is that you can get really down in the details and…

Once you really master the game, your biggest danger is yourself: get-there-itis, sloppy preflights, pushing things a little at a time, getting away with them, then pushing more, and so on. Normalization of deviance, for people interested in the literature.

This is a big killer, moreso than most pilots realize. The reason it's so deadly is that it turns up in a bunch of crashes where it's not identified. That VFR pilot who was scud-running and ended up in some culmulo granite? He probably did it and got away with it several times before the crash happened.

I don't fly anymore, but when I did? I used to get all the aviation safety magazines and read them cover-to-cover. I also knew some flight instructor instructors; people known for teaching safety in the industry.

A surprising number of well-trained pilots get in perfectly good airplanes and fly them until they run out of gas. Just because you pushed it those last dozen times doesn't mean you're going to get away with it this time.

EDIT: One of the more unusual crashes I will mention since this is HN happened out in the mountain states. A couple of thousand hour+ MEII pilots get into a multi-million dollar brand new jet. It's CAVU -- clear skies, visibility unlimited. They then proceed to fly the plane into the side of a mountain -- all the time trying to figure out the new switches and displays in the cockpit. I still think of that one when designing UX. Aviation is really complex, detailed, fun, and full of math like programming. But it is also a life-and-death endeavor if you take it too lightly. If you're safety paranoid, take up boating. It's much more forgiving than aviation.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#135

Post by delinka »

bigred100 wrote: post #40
redis_mlc wrote: post #10

Woz 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…

I wonder why rich people have such a high urge to fly small airplanes. It seems to expose you to a lot of risk, which you could easily avoid (I’ve lived a considerable number of years without facing a single situation where I was likely to fly an airplane).

I think it's "humans have the drive to do exciting things" regardless of financial status. Add money, and now they can do more expensive exciting things ... like flying small fast planes instead of small fast(-ish) cars.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#136

Post by delinka »

ggm wrote: post #9
dekhn wrote: post #3

I 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!

Jobs would have found a similarly capable engineer. Apple wouldn't be much different.

Imagine where Woz's life might have taken him had his dad worked elsewhere...

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#137

Post by JoeAltmaier »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #134
barrkel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you really master the game, your biggest danger is yourself: get-there-itis, sloppy preflights, pushing things a little at a time, getting away with them, then pushing more, and so on. Normalization of deviance, for people interested in the literature.

This is a big killer, moreso than most pilots realize. The reason it's so deadly is that it turns up in a bunch of crashes where it's not identified. That VFR pilot who was scud-running and ended up in some culmulo granite? He probably did it and got away with it several times before the crash happened. I don't fly anymore, but when I did? I used to get all the aviation safety magazines and read them cover-to-cover.…

John Denver ran out of gas while flying over a mountain pass. Exactly at the top - dropped and hit the tip of the peak while fumbling for the fuel switch.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#138

Post by vidarh »

bsaul wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no implication that "he isn't fine with his gender". The implication is that the speaker doesn't know, and it doesn't matter enough to find out or make a judgement call. Personally I still use he/she most of the time unless I have a reason not to, but I also try to get into the habit of assuming less, not least because online in particular it is increasingly noticeable how often we assume someone's gender ev…

« One reason to do so may be to explicitly normalise the usage so it doesn't imply a value judgement » That’s some scary sentence here. so gender is now a « judgment ». Like, there’s no reason to assume because steve wozniak has all the physical characteristics of a male, and has always been called « mister », using « he » (which is the grammatically correct way of designing a male human in the english language by de…

You completely failed to understand what I was saying, which is that currently, when you say "they", some portion tends to jump to the conclusion that you're trying to make a point about the person you're talking about.

But some people use "they" just as a default when they're not sure. Using it as a default all of the time then serves to remove the consideration of whether or not it is done to try to send some sort of signal about the subject.

As a case in point, you here keep talking about Woz, but there is no reason to assume that using "they" was meant to imply anything about Woz at all. As such you're demonstrating exactly why to some using "they" in a bid to normalize it matters.

As for getting scared about it, it's just a pronoun. If that "scares" you, then that is an indication to me of why it is important.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#139

Post by rusk »

foldr wrote: post #116
rusk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm sympathetic to this point of view, it seems pretty clear to me that Woz self-identifies as male. He has quite a visible profile and has never presented as anything other than masculine (with the exception maybe of the odd flourish on dancing with the stars ), so to select such a pronoun in this case I believe is disregarding how he would wish to be identified.

Using a gender neutral pronoun isn't disregarding a person's gender identity, any more than referring to them as a "person" is.

I actually really don’t mind that much, I believe we can use language in whatever way suits us to express our thoughts and beliefs. Gp wasnt being prescriptive upon other people and I respect that. I am all for addressing people by their favoured pronoun.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#140

Post by DanielBMarkham »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #137
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big killer, moreso than most pilots realize. The reason it's so deadly is that it turns up in a bunch of crashes where it's not identified. That VFR pilot who was scud-running and ended up in some culmulo granite? He probably did it and got away with it several times before the crash happened. I don't fly anymore, but when I did? I used to get all the aviation safety magazines and read them cover-to-cover.…

John Denver ran out of gas while flying over a mountain pass. Exactly at the top - dropped and hit the tip of the peak while fumbling for the fuel switch.

Another good one. From what I've heard, he was a good pilot. The switch was mounted in an awkward and non-standard position. (Behind the pilot's seat, I think?)

Aside from the downdraft issue, running out of gas at altitude in VMC can be very interesting, but it doesn't have to be fatal. Even in heavily-forested areas, in a small plane you can put out the barn doors and decrease your horizontal speed quite bit, especially with a headwind.

We had a guy in Virginia in the 90s, I think. He was a student-ish pilot in a 150 that ended up in IMC (fog) in the heavily-wooded mountains while running out of gas.

He slowed the plane down as much he could, somehow kept the wings level, and ended up on somebody's back deck. Walked away. That's not guaranteed, of course, but in general planes are crash-rated based on flying directly into something. It's the failure to maintain control that kills many times more than the crash itself. Heck, they used to have shows where people crashed planes on purpose.

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