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Re: Is binary a "language"?

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On Apr 12, 11:00 pm, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
wrote:
> "osmium" <r124c4u...@comcast.net> writes:
> > "Pascal J. Bourguignon" wrote:
>
> >> Decimal computers used electronic tubes with ten states.
>
> > Can you provide a reference to such a computer that ever got out of
> > someone's basement?  My guess is that you can not.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
>
> Perhaps you could learn some computing history.  
> After all it's less than a hundred years of history, even a lazy bumb
> could have some notions.

"ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit
used 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the
flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by "counting"
pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the
counter "wrapped around", the idea being to emulate in electronics the
operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine. ENIAC
had twenty ten-digit signed accumulators which used ten's complement
representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction
operations between any of them and a source (e.g., another
accumulator, or a constant transmitter) every second. It was possible
to connect several accumulators to run simultaneously, so the peak
speed of operation was potentially much higher due to parallel
operation."

But ... weren't the tubes themselves bistable? Isn't this why they are
called "flip flops"? Without being an electronics whiz it looks to me
as if the ENIAC, just like the 1401, was an over-elaborate simulation
of decimal based on binary devices.

I maintain that you need to go back to adding machines with ten
position wheels to get n above two.

Or, analogue computers where n = aleph-one, that is, nondenumerable
infinity.
>
> --
> __Pascal Bourguignon__                    http://www.informatimago.com/
> A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-12 05:57 -0700
  Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-12 16:33 +0200
    Re: Is binary a "language"? "osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2011-04-12 09:46 -0500
      Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-12 17:00 +0200
        Re: Is binary a "language"? "osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2011-04-12 10:11 -0500
        Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-15 06:07 -0700
          Re: Is binary a "language"? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2011-04-15 14:40 +0100
            Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-16 06:58 -0700
          Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-15 19:23 +0200
            Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-16 07:19 -0700
              Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-17 02:30 +0200
        Re: Is binary a "language"? Thad Smith <ThadSmith@acm.org> - 2011-04-24 15:37 -0700
      Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-15 06:01 -0700
    Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-15 05:40 -0700
      Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-15 19:12 +0200
        Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-16 07:15 -0700

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