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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

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Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#81

Post by bolder88 »

Zenst wrote: post #55
bolder88 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely also ridiculous diversions such as the C5 electric car. "Micromen" is a fantastic drama of the period... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE

At the time of the C5 I worked for one of the then government owned utility companies which had shops selling the C5. Was able to get a staff discount but was told of of the 2 seater version with a roof that was planned for release and saw pictures and spec etc, so I waited. Great idea, ahead of it's time engineering and attitude wise as well. Did not even have rare earth magnets, seen C5's with rare earth magnet mot…

I'm not sure I agree it's a good idea at all.

30 years later, and the electric car market is still miniscule.

There might start to be a market demand for them when petrol is at least twice as expensive as it is now. But there's some wiggle room to reduce the tax on it a lot.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#82

Post by memsom »

bolder88 wrote: post #50
kryptiskt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One unnamed reason for Sinclair Radionics' falling apart was their digital watch, Black Watch, which was the ultimate example of Sinclair's infamous cost cutting and lack of quality control. http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm

Surely also ridiculous diversions such as the C5 electric car. "Micromen" is a fantastic drama of the period... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE

Different company. Sinclair Research was the company that was born from the ruins of Radiophonics.

Not that Research fared much better!

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#83

Post by memsom »

6ren wrote: post #20

Unfortunately, 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…

But Sinclair went on to kick start the UK Microcomputer industry. The ZX range (Aka TS range in the States) was one of the most popular an influential home computers of the 8-bit era. I think only the C64 beat it world wide. it was also one of the most cloned systems as Brazil, Russia and many other Eastern European countries cloned it and extended the original design.

Apple was niche and mostly unknown in the UK at the time. The Apple II never really made it here.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#84

Post by lutusp »

NotAnEngineer wrote: post #77
lutusp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't really "place" it in the public domain, I just let nature take its course. The inevitable result is that there are now only versions of the program online in which my name and copyright notice have been removed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw

I searched for the original program online, but couldn't find it -- only the pirated version. By "pirated" I mean someone has removed my copyright notice and offered the program as their own, successfully replacing the original in all online archives.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#85

Post by lutusp »

TheCrownedFox wrote: post #70
lutusp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that and Apple Writer. Full disclosure: I wrote Apple Writer.

Is this you? http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... If so, how do I end up end where you are, in regards to wilderness programming and whatnot? Do you have a book (of any sort)? That's my dream.

> Is this you?

> http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...

Yep, that's me.

> If so, how do I end up end where you are, in regards to wilderness programming and whatnot?

Rather than try to duplicate my story, why not see how yours turns out? I bet it will be just as interesting.

> Do you have a book (of any sort)?

Only a free one about my around-the-world solo sail -- it includes lots of stories about my technological adventures:

http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html

You can read it online or download a free Kindle file.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#86

Post by anonymouz »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #35
nealabq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I got used to RPN (I had a lovely old HP-21) I found it much more intuitive. Stack-based thinking. No parentheses! (And I've used LISP for years, but that's entirely different.) RPN vs Infix/Algebraic used to be a holy-war topic. Like emacs vs vi, or iPhone vs Android. Once you go RPN, you can never go back again.

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.

On the HP calculators the separator would usually be the enter key. I think the old ones displayed just the top entry of the stack, on the newer ones with bigger display you see the stack with each entry on one line.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#87

Post by NotAnEngineer »

lutusp wrote: post #84
NotAnEngineer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't really "place" it in the public domain, I just let nature take its course. The inevitable result is that there are now only versions of the program online in which my name and copyright notice have been removed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw I searched for the original program online, but couldn't find it -- only the pirated version. By "pirated" I mean someone has removed my copyright notice an…

(Obligatory: OMG, I'm talking to Paul Lutus!)

Yeah, the Apple II era seems to have been particularly destructive with removing copyright notices in favor of "crack screens" and other drivel. Bleah.

More recently, I've been working on my own Apple II game (really). I'd like to release it fully open source, which makes it particularly challenging to use third-party libraries since open source wasn't really a "thing" when they were written. Some of them (notably old Beagle Bros. disks) have since been explicitly placed in the public domain.

So... I would very much like to have some Electric-Duet-based music and sound effects in my upcoming open source Apple II game. (Yes, I just typed that.) Would you be willing to relicense your amazing player routine under an open source license, or to place it in the public domain? I would, of course, give you full copyright attribution in the scrolling credits screen or wherever you'd like.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#88

Post by Tloewald »

ck2 wrote: post #22
6ren wrote: post #20

Unfortunately, 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…

Apple fell to the PC because the hardware was a fraction of the price since clones were allowed to exist in the PC world. Apple sued their clones out of existence. Might all be using Apple today if they had not. Then they eventually switched to pc hardware themselves.

Apple seems to be still around. You can google it to check. Apple's problem with PC was initially simply that IBM sold the PC. For many years PCs were more or comparably expensive and much less useful than Macs, but sold because they were backed by IBM. And Apple did very well despite its lower market share until John Sculley started listening to pundits and lowered prices in the early 90s. Even so that worked Ok until Spindler listened to more pundits and started allowing clones.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#89

Post by Tloewald »

I owned Sinclair's programmable scientific calculator from a few years later which was similarly "interesting". It had 36 program steps (vs. 72 for the HP65 iirc), so storage system, and only one memory. Each constant in a program counted as N+1 steps where N was the number of button presses were needed. So it taught me about multiply re-entrant code.

I also owned a Sinclair ZX-80 (aka Timex) computer, later upgraded to a ZX-81 ROM with 16kB of memory.

Overall, Sinclair's problem seems to have been going a little too far in the "worse is better" direction with every product.

Re: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

#90

Post by zbinga »

lutusp wrote: post #84
NotAnEngineer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't really "place" it in the public domain, I just let nature take its course. The inevitable result is that there are now only versions of the program online in which my name and copyright notice have been removed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw I searched for the original program online, but couldn't find it -- only the pirated version. By "pirated" I mean someone has removed my copyright notice an…

The original was copy-protected, I believe, which means it cannot be archived in the standard .dsk format (there are some more complicated formats that represent a disk at a lower level, but they are not very well supported by emulators). In a few decades, the only surviving copies of many 80s software programs will be the ones that were cracked and distributed widely. In this way, crackers and pirates acted as inadvertent archivists.

For what it's worth, the pirated version I had (back in the old days) had your name on it (plus a crack group's name and probably BBS phone number). I remember thinking "Hey, that's the Apple Writer guy, what else did he write?" and that's how I found GraFORTH. Bought Leo Brodie's book and had a blast learning the language, then actually implementing small Forth-like languages for the fun of it. There was a Byte book, "Threaded Interpretive Languages" that gave me several epiphanies about programming in general and language design in particular.

I used Apple Writer for years, until eventually my typing speed increased so much that the program couldn't keep up with me anymore when typing long paragraphs (the word wrap algorithm, that was run after each character, apparently took time proportional to the length of the current paragraph, with a big enough constant that my 1 MHz Apple II started dropping keystrokes regularly despite the program having a 32-character buffer). I eventually resorted to disabling word-wrap while typing, and re-enabling it prior to printing (Control-Z, I think it was). Later, I bought a Zip Chip that increased the computer speed to about 3.5 MHz, and the problem disappeared.

I wasn't using Apple Writer by then, because I had discovered another word processor, a weird, Rube Goldberg contraption called Gutenberg Sr. that used double-high-resolution graphics at a time when few programs did, and had a more powerful markup language (troff-inspired, I found out later), could two two-column printing and had some page layout capabilities, and had great support for printer-downloadable fonts, including user-defined ones. The interface was atrocious but the software itself was powerful.

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