On 28/10/2015 07:56 AM, Stephen wrote:
> On 10/27/2015 8:31 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> Qui-binary...?
>>
>> My mind is blown.
>>
> I know and I thought BCD was strange.

BCD is one thing. LSD...?!

>> As an aside, Hackaday.io seems to be full of people building computers
>> "from scratch", using only individual logic gates. One guy claimed to be
>> building a computer from nothing but 7400s...
>>
>> ....until you realise that he means the members of the 7400 family that
>> implement entire counters, encoders, decoders, latches, etc.
>>
>
> I hope he has a big power supply and lots of fans.

Heh, yeah, well...

>> It's interesting to me that the IBM 1401 appears to be a *real* computer
>> made only from discrete transistors. I'd always assumed that such a
>> thing would fill an entire warehouse. But it doesn't actually look all
>> that big...
>
> That is a media exaggeration. They were forever showing images of
> computer systems in enormous clean rooms with technicians in white coats.
> One company I worked for had an old PDP 8. It fitted inside a 19 inch
> cabinet. I only once opened the door to look at the guts. I then prayed
> it would never break. ;-)

I often wonder... like, how much did [famous obsolete computer] actually 
cost? What did it physically look like? What were its technical 
capabilities? It's very hard to gather a general overview of this type 
of data.

For that matter, how many FLOPS can you get out of an Inter Core i7? I 
have absolutely no idea; it seems very hard to find data for this...

>> Only just finished reading this.
>>
>> Man, that is some special brand of craziness, right there. Mental stuff.
>
> Funnily enough. His project reminded me of you. Did you not once write
> programs in PostScript or Printer Command Language?

PostScript. And it wasn't *once*. ;-)

Actually, I did start trying to write a PostScript *interpreter*, to 
make debugging this stuff easier! It turns out the language has a lot 
more edge-cases than you'd think though...

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