Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!nx02.iad01.newshosting.com!newshosting.com!novia!news-out.readnews.com!transit3.readnews.com!postnews.google.com!v33g2000prn.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: spinoza1111 Newsgroups: comp.programming Subject: Re: Is binary a "language"? Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:07:04 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 46 Message-ID: <29fc0345-1b7b-4e11-bcfe-bde8adebae93@v33g2000prn.googlegroups.com> References: <48ecad59-950d-40ff-9fa6-6f107008335a@fu15g2000vbb.googlegroups.com> <87wrizczf3.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <90j6tbFlrfU1@mid.individual.net> <87lizfcy54.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 219.77.105.233 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1302872824 23068 127.0.0.1 (15 Apr 2011 13:07:04 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:07:04 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: v33g2000prn.googlegroups.com; posting-host=219.77.105.233; posting-account=-pwIpAoAAABifa4TH51j6tjgOZqMDoDq User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16,gzip(gfe) Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.programming:232 On Apr 12, 11:00=A0pm, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" wrote: > "osmium" 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? =A0My guess is that you can not. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC > > Perhaps you could learn some computing history. =A0 > 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 =3D aleph-one, that is, nondenumerable infinity. > > -- > __Pascal Bourguignon__ =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0http://www.= informatimago.com/ > A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.