Classic Calculator Was Reverse Engineered from the Bare Metal
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
This is a great example of a place where you shouldn't use punc-quote formatting. There is no . key on the calculator, but that's not obvious while you're reading the article.
There's no place where it should be used. It can only introduce ambiguities, never solve any.
Quote-punc, on the other hand, doesn't introduce any. What always drove me nuts in academic writing was the knowledge that no matter how well I chose to format my article, the publisher would always introduce punc-quote and wreck things.
I'd have to defensively write around the potential placement of a punctuation mark which is just insane.
This went on for quite a while, you can only admire my boss's perseverance. However, what I don't understand is how these mistakes could have been introduced in the first place? It almost felt like someone on the other end was actually retyping all of her writing, or else how was it possible to get all of these mistakes in there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Fake_journals
Disclosure: I formerly worked for MDPI, a rival.
Edit: I mean the punctuation inside of the quotes being traditional.
5 ENTER 4 + 5 + 4 +
So I blame proportional fonts for their missing ligatures. :-)
I guess I misremembered. The old reference from the 1800's is https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hx521x&view=1up&s..., he clearly puts the quotes on the outside too.
it seems like this is a really basic idea, but a web search is failing to explain to me what "punc-quote" formatting means. I get that it refers to how a command should be parsed, and how punctuation affects it, but can you give me a link to a formal explanation?
The former is supposedly the “correct” way, at least in English, but you can see from my explanation that I’m absolute against it. I’m sorry, it’s just wrong on so many levels, and whoever invented it were not understanding what they were doing.
https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-aroun...
This rule is obvs not super composable, and leads to a lot of confusion when punctuation (or lack thereof) is part of what you're trying to quote.
The Sinclair Scientific was able to reduce complexity by using reverse Polish notation, in which mathematical operators come after the numbers they are operating on — for instance:
5 + 4
5 4 +
The U.S. chose its quotation-mark rules for graphical reasons, not logical ones. But the graphical improvement is slight, even debatable.
I wonder if my fellow Americans even notice the difference or remember which way is right. In fact, sometimes they look at it askew. One of my Facebook posts drew criticism from my friends, who said it was hard to parse. It was a post about different words, so several were in quotes, intermixed with commas, and I had diligently followed the American style.
I have hesitated to adopt quote-punc, just as I write color instead of colour. When a difference is slight, I think it's better to follow convention --- like contributing to source code and using the indentation style already there.
But after the Facebook incident and others, including this one, I'm beginning to think the difference isn't slight. Especially in the global melting pot of the Internet, it matters less to follow your own country's convention.
Genius!
I would have thought that their very expensive membership fees and article/publication fees would have covered their operating expenses.
Because you forgot to install or enable an ad blocker. I know this is not a real answer to your question but it is the best answer to the annoying ads problem.
Why not? The advertising is never going to stop unless everyone blocks it. Content blockers should come pre-installed with all browsers. Ideally, they should be fully integrated features instead of mere extensions.
That's the only way for browsers to still retain their status as user agents. Browsers are supposed to act on our behalf by showing us the information we want to see. They aren't supposed to show us advertising noise for someone else's benefit.
> I would have thought that their very expensive membership fees and article/publication fees would have covered their operating expenses.
It's not about covering operating expenses. Memberships revenue + advertising revenue will always be greater than memberships revenue alone. It's an easy choice for them to make. Why would they actively choose to make less money than they could be making?
This advertising noise will never disappear on its own. We need to actively get rid of it. We need to make it so that advertising is a waste of money for companies. That's the only way to make them stop.
The architecture is truly odd, using 44 bit registers (11 x 4-bit BCD) and 11-bit opcodes. It is more like an electrical abacus than a microcontroller.
The funny thing is that what the patent actually claims is an obscure technique for connecting the ground lines in the calculator's ROM. In other words, almost all the detailed text in the patent is irrelevant to what is actually patented.
And what are the best and worst features of this hardware architecture? Was there any little thing you think the designers should have done to improve it? Or was there something genius about it?
As far as the architecture of the calculator, it's kind of amazing that they were able to build a calculator chip at all, given the state of IC technology. The architecture is highly tuned to calculators, rather than being general-purpose. For instance, a "digit scan" register cycles through 10 scan lines to illuminate each digit. At the same time, it scans 10 rows of the keyboard.
Another interesting thing about the calculator chip is it has 11-bit opcodes. Powers of two are so ingrained in us that it seems bizarre to have 11-bit opcodes. But old computers often had random word lengths. The calculator's instruction set is very low-level, more like microcode than a "real" instruction set.
It doesn’t do the latter because of lack of memory to implement it in. http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...:
“How can sine and cosine be computed efficiently in a calculator that has a hard time even doing multiplication? The trick is to do repeated rotations by 0.001 radians until the desired angle is reached.
[…]
Other calculators use algorithms such as decimal CORDIC that are much faster and more accurate, taking time proportional to the number of digits.”
https://hackaday.io/project/91895-sinclair-scientific-calcul...
It's not really RPN though. RPN lets you write "2 × (5+4)" as "2 5 4 + ×", but the Sinclair Scientific doesn't support that. It would have needed a stack for that, which wasn't available. Instead each operation simply acts on the previous result. You'd have to use "5 + 4 + 2 ×" instead.
Still very impressive how they managed to accomplish all that using that simple TI chip and only 320 instructions.
But that is both mentally more difficult to handle and physically more difficult to input than "5 ENTER 4 + 2 ×", so I wouldn't count this as a strike against the Sinclair even theoretically.
(Self-promotion) I always wanted to design a calculator and finally got around to it as a lockdown project - https://ucalc.app
People forget simple things like steering servos were not available to most kids until the 90s injection molding explosion that is so ubiq today.
So to "stop" you had to keep tapping the button.