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From: Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 16:40:14 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <zrz47njfzctbxdqsjnnskppq@localhost>

On 10/19/2019 4:12 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote:
> As long as you have the basic instructions (which pretty much any
> computer capable of doing useful arithemtic calculations will need
> anyway), you can implement the rest of what you need using those
> building blocks. Specific_hardware_  support for floating point
> calculations is not needed.

Not to mention, if you start using log/alog tables, and/or sin/cos/tan 
tables, and interpolation, you can quickly ramp up computation speed for 
simple games that have a small matrix of coordinates. Something like 
EMPIRE becomes quite easy.

Imagine my distress when, after cutting my teeth on a PDP-10, that 
working on a 6502 I had to do my own division. Oh, the HORROR!

art k.


  reply	other threads:[~2019-10-19 20:40 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-10-19 14:40 [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code Doug McIlroy
2019-10-19 18:32 ` Abhinav Rajagopalan
2019-10-19 18:44   ` Abhinav Rajagopalan
2019-10-19 19:19   ` Clem Cole
2019-10-19 19:50     ` Henry Bent
2019-10-19 19:55       ` [TUHS] Space Travel related question Thomas Paulsen
2019-10-19 20:19         ` Warner Losh
2019-10-19 20:24       ` [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code Arthur Krewat
2019-10-19 20:12   ` [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel Michael Kjörling
2019-10-19 20:40     ` Arthur Krewat [this message]
2019-10-19 21:15       ` Michael Kjörling
2019-10-21  5:14       ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-21  5:23         ` Lars Brinkhoff
2019-10-21 13:59           ` John P. Linderman
     [not found]             ` <68553366-4E6F-4E17-8903-282C67186D16@humeweb.com>
2019-10-26  2:24               ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-26  2:09           ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-21  4:55     ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-21 19:21       ` Paul Winalski
2019-10-21 19:38         ` Kurt H Maier

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