From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 09:20:56 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8! In-Reply-To: References: <01db01d2a32a$1eae0280$5c0a0780$@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: <20170326222056.GD81001@eureka.lemis.com> On Sunday, 26 March 2017 at 16:11:30 -0400, Paul Winalski wrote: > On 3/26/17, Dave Horsfall wrote [regarding the PDP-8]: >> Yep, it could add, but not subtract. Dammit, but I'm trying to think of >> the CADET acronym; it went something like "Can't Add, Didn't Even Try". >> > CADET was the official IBM internal development code name for the > 1620, designed to be a low cost computer for the scientific > marketplace. Part of the reduced cost was attained by abandoning the > traditional ALU circuitry. Instead the 1620 did arithmetic by table > lookup. The joke was made that CADET stood for "Can't Add, Doesn't > Even Try", and that interpretation stuck and became popular with the > machine's user community. I didn't know it was an official name of a project, and I thought it referred to the 1401, the predecessor of the 1620. To be fair, they did arithmetic one byte at a time, so a table lookup made sense. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: