On Saturday 19 October 2019 08:38:15 John Hasler wrote: > Joe quotes: > > "If you think you need to use floating point, you don't fully > > understand your application." > > Right. There isn't anything you can't do with bignum. > > I wrote software for control systems using cpus such as the RCA 1802. > You can do a lot more with 8 bit integers than seems possible at first > thought. > I'll back that up. The first "had a job to do" program I ever wrote, in 1978, was for a video production helper, laying a new digital academy leader on a finished commercial, intended to function with an automatic station break machine. This was at KRCR in Redding CA.
I used a cosmac super Elf, buying its case and an s-100 backplane, built the video board and added a then $400 for the kit 4kx8 static memory board to the cosmacs 256 bytes and the interface to a Sony 2850 3/4" u-matic tape machine it was controlling. I went on down the road looking for greener pastures after their long time chief came back to work from the heart attack he had 2 weeks after I was hired. I had no more contact with the station until '94 when I'd taken 2 weeks to visit an aunt in Salem OR who was fading. Calling to catch up, I found that in 94, 14 years later, my program was still in use many times a day. In a television stations control room, thats amazing, because while the technology used to play that commercial is constantly changing, the need to do that job accurately hadn't. And after scareing Microtime out of their shorts when I found the bare beginnings of such at their booth at the annual NBA shindig in Vegas the following year, and mentioning to the bow tie in the booth that I had already done that, only better, it had dissappeared an hour later and was never admitted to exist ever again. And no one else has ever attempted to do it unless they did their own version in house and kept it quiet. > You can also get by without a multiplier. I don't recall I needed to do any muls or divs, but did do some bit twiddling. My version of the time code was actually better than drop frame for tracking wall time. Not that it mattered over the maximum of 2 minutes and 10 second duration of laying down that new leader and the audio tones on one track of the audio that tied the tape to the station break machine. But I figured if a had to do it, do it right. :) FWIW, I still have 2 audio carts filled with backups of that program and a type written printout of its program on the top shelf of the bookcases on the walls of this room. My man cave. Memories of times past... Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>