Lower voltage diode the other side of a step up transformer?

Feb 26, 2023 Last reply: 2 years ago 92 Replies

Very good, you could substitute "mathematicians" with "aged programmers"!

The 12-bit PDP-8 and the 16-bit PDP-11 were both programmed in octal. The 11's instruction set was easy to remember in octal.

Ken Olson said that Dec would never program a computer in hex. He said some other silly things.

Nope, that's what he has always said.

The post with the link will be on groups.google but not easy to find because he changed his nym a lot more in those days.

Since he uses Opera as a news client and hardly anyone else does, it may be findable that way.

It is hardly surprising that a link to a photo no longer works.

Ok, after I suggested P Hucker had an IQ of 75, you replied with "No one with 75 can manage an honors degree in physics. . "

I therefore assumed his degree was in that subject. Microelectronics is more an engineering degree.

He's had a few nyms, but most of his posts were under Wilkinson, Macaw or similar. I've had a look. There was a suggestion that he posted it using dropbox but can't find any post that includes a dropbox link to a degree certificate.

I still don't see how he got a degree in microelectronics. Perhaps he told them he was on his deathbed and awarded one in sympathy?

Irrelevant to what that uni chose to call his degree.

More than a few in those days.

Most is irrelevant, what matters is which one he used for that post.

I don't recall which he used and I don't think he ever used dropbox then.

Your problem.

That's pathetic.

Maybe not, his use of Opera is relatively recent.

Maybe <honours physics> would find it. That can't be too common in uk.d-i-y

Probably doesn't work in American, where they think they got bombed on the 9th of November.

My Bing AI friend (who is American) says that it does work.

Many years ago, i made a bit of Visual Basic to transfer some data between MS Access and Excel. It all worked OK except that *some* of the dates were transferring incorrectly. It took me a while to notice that the faulty dates had day numbers 1-12, and that the months and days were reversed when this happened.

Both Access and Excel were of course set to UK dates and times, but something in the transfer function (the built-in bit) was assuming US dates. The thing is, it was programmed to notice when this would produce an impossible month, and it then reversed the day and the month, thus making it harder to spot the problem than if it had left them alone. Fixing it was a matter of transferring in a different format and rebuilding it on arrival.

The PDP-11 was a pure octal machine, even the memory management registers were shifted by 6 bit (two octal digits).

It was easy to write small programs directly from the front panel switches. The only nasty thing was to calculate the relative branch offsets :-)

In 1975 introduced VAX was a pure hex machine.

In the early days, the Intel documentation for the 8080 was octal, which was very natural due to the instruction formats (8 regs etc.).

For some reason, Intel changed later on to hex for 8080/8085 which made manual programming much harder. Apparently they understood that the hardware architecture was so weird that they started to support PL/M so that users did not have to program that awkward architecture in assembly. Now the same legacy is in 8086/386 and partially even in the 64 bit processor models.

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