On 9/16/11 01:48 Henry Schaffer said:
Did you know that the 1620 did arithmetic by table lookup - and it stored the tables in RAM - so you had to load the tables each time it was turned on. One could load octal tables and then it did octal arithmetic!
... which was why it was known as the "Cadet" (Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try). Since memory was addressed in base 10, you could do math in octal but not hex. Also, the somewhat lengthy delay after power-up was give that massive 20,000-character core memory time to warm up. The rest of the frames had fans for cooling but the memory box had heaters. -Chip- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
