Earlier quoted context omitted.
VisiCalc on the Apple had a huge contribution to its success. It was the proverbial "killer app" that drove Apple II sales.
Yes, that and Apple Writer. Full disclosure: I wrote Apple Writer.
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
71–80 of 103 posts
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#72Unfortunately, as calculator prices collapsed, so did Sinclair Radionics' profits, and the company was broken up in 1979 after heavy losses. He fought Moore's law, and the law won. But this whole thing reminds me of Woz's work in the first Apples. Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? Soon after the Apple, there were dozens - hundreds - of new personal computer manufacturers. I think it's software. The valu…
As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat".
Software brings the real value to hardware.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#73While clever and inexpensive, the low speed and low accuracy of this device made it unusable. It was billed as "3-figure accuracy", but in fact it only got that on some cases. A bright undergrad or grad student could quickly uncover useful problems that it flat out couldn't solve.
In short, it was a toy. Anyone basing one's academic grade on this thing was a fool. You really did have to spend the money for an HP-35, or the later Texas Instruments SR-5x calculators that were less expensive.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one issue I've already had with RPN is that you require a separator between numbers anyways - in RPN it's too easy to parse "23 4 +" as "2 34 +", for example, especially if you're writing quickly.
Might have been better to demonstrate that using subtraction as addition is commutative and thus either one works fine in this case.
One is 27; the other is 36.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#75If you need to explain this too less geeky friends then telling them that this amount of storage is less than a single letter on a modern display. Which on a 32bit display at 12x12 you would be on 576 bytes (8 bits) and this is compared to a 320 11 bit word (320x11/8=440) 440 bytes. This makes chess on a 1k zx81 including display seem like bloat-ware now :). Nowadays we have more storage on the keyboard controller ch…
Given that Sprite managed to get Linux booting on a hard disks processor [0], I'm increasingly aware that the embedded device we use are overpowered. Makes for some interesitng hacking though, I bet you could run a webserver on my washing machine.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
And thank you for writing Electric Duet! That program inspired me to (cough) take it apart and understand how something so cool could come out of the Apple II's speaker. That exercise taught me 6502 opcodes and I've been working in embedded systems ever since.
Looking back, I realize I must have spent two weeks just writing the Electric Duet player, because the time through the player loop had to be constant. The loop read through the notes to be played, synthesized them, and changed their duty cycle, but had to use the exact same number of machine cycles regardless of what it did, so the music stayed in tune. Near the end of the project, I had two problems: the music was…
I've had similar situations, but never as victorious as that. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that story....(now I want to get that code back somehow and look for that NOP)
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
And thank you for writing Electric Duet! That program inspired me to (cough) take it apart and understand how something so cool could come out of the Apple II's speaker. That exercise taught me 6502 opcodes and I've been working in embedded systems ever since.
Looking back, I realize I must have spent two weeks just writing the Electric Duet player, because the time through the player loop had to be constant. The loop read through the notes to be played, synthesized them, and changed their duty cycle, but had to use the exact same number of machine cycles regardless of what it did, so the music stayed in tune. Near the end of the project, I had two problems: the music was…
Horribly off topic, but what is the current status of the Electric Duet player routine? I read somewhere that you had placed it in the public domain in the 90s, but I can't find any confirmation of that.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The joke has been going on for quite some time now - Lisp and related languages use Polish Notation everywhere. (The main benefit is that (R)PN is parenthesis-free, so it makes it easier for a calculator to process expressions with multiple operators. The use in programming languages is nonexistent but to make clear that +, *, .. are just like any other function call, where you would naturally use polish notation.)
> Lisp and related languages use Polish Notation everywhere. > The main benefit is that (R)PN is parenthesis-free ... so what you're saying is Lisp has all those parenthesis just to troll us? Seriously though, using PN can make implementing parsers a lot simpler as it makes the grammar less ambiguous.
I don't know about less ambiguous, it can still require only single token lookahead and be context-free without any parentheses, but Lisp-ish languages are easier to parse because you have fewer productions to worry about compared to more complex languages.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#79Unfortunately, as calculator prices collapsed, so did Sinclair Radionics' profits, and the company was broken up in 1979 after heavy losses. He fought Moore's law, and the law won. But this whole thing reminds me of Woz's work in the first Apples. Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? Soon after the Apple, there were dozens - hundreds - of new personal computer manufacturers. I think it's software. The valu…
Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? A good question. I'd say that the Apple II family survived longer than it deserved to because the hardware was so nice. Woz combined classical hacker insights with a look-and-feel quality ethic that the Commodores and Ataris couldn't live up to, being designed to target a price point beyond all else. Sure, those computers could do tricks with graphics and sound that the…
I agree Apple did well by getting entrenched in the education market in the US.
Combined with Tandy's failure to follow up, and Commodore's incessant bungling in the US market (such as repeatedly pissing off their dealer network by letting their dealers absorb unannounced price changes) and decision to send most of its stock to Europe where they got higher margins, that explains more of it than lack of alternatives.
In Europe, Apple remained virtually unheard of until the Mac compared to Commodore, Atari and homegrown brands.
Largely thanks to its European market, Commodore still massively outsold Apple in terms of units shipped up until well into the Mac got popular - it's just that by the time the IIe started getting traction, Commodore had abandoned the high end and gone for volume, and by the time they went after the high end again, it was 1985, and Commodore's brand and sales channel in the US was even more tied to the cheap gaming image.
But if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text you had several alternatives at the time of the IIe launch, at around the same price range, both from Commodore and others (from Commodore, the later entrants in the PET range - one is actually on display in my local library - as well as the ill fated Commodore B128-80)
Most of the other entrants that could compete for productivity applications in the same price range were from small unknown companies or insufficiently compatible with anything to get enough software, though, and so had little chance.
Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
#80I really wish someone would make a modern scientific calculator - Imagine what would be possible on a modern ARM processor. Even the new HP calculators use old ~70mhz ARM processors emulating the even older saturn HP48 code... You could build it on top of Android, and have the software be open-source while making money from selling the hardware (so you could run it on a touchscreen, but if you wanted a keyboard you'd…
There are modern calculators: Mathematica, Matlab, and the most used: Excel For tasks that need to be done away from a computer sure a calculator is handy but that has rather dwindled down to basic calculations. Schoolwork sure calculators are great but I never needed more than my HP-48 and when I did it was usually an assignment meant more for MATLAB/Mathematica. Now for your point of building it on top of android,…
Calca is also a nice take on the "modern calculator"