That's an interesting site that I hadn't seen before. I never suspected the algorithm that RW used in the original FLW clock was so circuitous but taking the technology of the time into account it's not really surprising. I have made several FLW clocks over the years both with B7971 tubes and with CRT displays. By the time I got interested in them it was possible to download the entire Scrabble 4000 word four letter dictionary into a $5 microcontroller and have enough memory left to run the clock, generate random numbers (for indexing) and do vector graphics. In my clocks the word changes every 5 or 10 seconds and there is a switch on the back to control whether or not "rude" words are shown. The grandkids love it as a word game.
Incidentally the price of US$195 in 1973 is equivalent to about US$1195 today. Only a certain demographic could afford one! Morris On Friday, 28 May 2021 at 13:17:15 UTC+10 J Forbes wrote: > A start here...but there is lots more if you delve deep into the old posts > on this group. > > https://www.oocities.org/tokyo/8908/fourletterword/index.html > > On Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 7:54:48 PM UTC-7 celephicus wrote: > >> Greetings, >> >> I am doing a Hackaday project on my enormous FLW build, and I would like >> to know the history of the FLW concept, I know Raymond Weisling invented >> them, is there an authoritative history of them? In particular, who came up >> with the idea of using a word association database to generate the words? >> >> Tom Harris <[email protected]> >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/339002df-a053-45cf-a46f-999e5b597e16n%40googlegroups.com.
