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Re: Is binary a "language"?

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On Apr 16, 1:12 am, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
wrote:
> spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> > On Apr 12, 10:33 pm, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
> > wrote:
> >>spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> >> > You missed the point at which it was clear that binary is an adjective
> >> > and not a noun, Mijn Heer. "I program using binary" needs to be
> >> > rewritten in "normal form" as "I program using binary machine
> >> > language". The word "binary" adds information since historically, not
> >> > all machine languages were binary. Decimal computers were programmed
> >> > by way of 6-bit codes in decimal machine language.
>
> >> So were they decimal or binary???
>
> >> Decimal computers used electronic tubes with ten states.
>
> >> Russians developed ternary computers where three electronic states were
> >> used.
>
> >> If you have only two states, then it's binary.
>
> >> Since decimal arithmetic has the advantage of being the one human
> >> usually use, it was simulated on binary computers (destined to
> >> business applications), by encoding one decimal digit into FOUR bits,
> >> not six.
>
> > The IBM 1401 was "decimal" because at the level of machine language
> > the basic unit of information was 6 bits, and a subset of the 64
> > characters took part in math that was based on electronic table
> > lookup.
>
> Yes, but while the 1401 was a decimal computer, its hardware was
> binary: it used groups of bits to store the decimal digits.

Right ho.
>
> > However, each character had an extrabit called the word mark which
> > delimited operands which were fully variable length. You could for
> > this reason do extra precision calculation without special
> > programming. In response to an article in the Journal of Symbolic
> > Logic, I wrote a very simple program to calculate and print the exact
> > value of 100! in decimal. This is easy today but somewhat rare in
> > 1973, so, the printout became part of the math department's incunabula
> > and curio collection for a number of years.
>
> > However, after programming the 1401 for a few years, I realized that
> > through an interpreter it could be fully binary. You could even use
> > the word mark effectively increasing the size of its memory.
>
> That's why the question is unimportant.  Thanks to Turing and the
> equivalence of Universal Turing Machines, we know that we can always
> implement a different processor as a virtual machine.

Which of course I'd learned and thought rather significant, mostly
because the university was up to its ass in IBM sales greed-heads
trying to flog us a 360/30 (yechhhh), a 360/20 (double yecchhhh), or a
System/3 (let's not go there). The Chicago police department wanted to
GIVE us its 1440, a large scale 1401, but the greedheads torpedoed
this, sadly.

Basically, Roosevelt didn't want to give me (a long haired kid) the
power to write an OS for telecom etc. I was a bit goofy and of the
hippie persuasion, but, more important, I'd been an SEIU union member
and was friendly with union members. One of the goals of the
university's computerization (despite the fact that union bureaucrats
were on its board of directors) was to reduce the SEIU's power at
Roosevelt, and in this they have succeeded: their current data
processing is completely outsourced.

[A year before I started, the computer center manager had fired a
union computer operator for "throwing out the assembler". The operator
had in fact merely tossed a COPY of the "SPS Assembler" because it was
mispunched. He grieved his termination through the union and won.]

To me the Turing equivalence was a noble thing, for it meant that the
arrogance of the big mainframe nerds at the Univ of Chicago with their
la di da 7094 was mathematically untenable. This was because at this
time, there was no real "time" limitation because computers were
underutilized by their surrounding bureaucracy and you could use
secondary storage (disk and even magnetic tape) as "virtual storage":
this was being done on a retail basis in individual programs through
"overlays" up to IBM's announcement of OS supported virtual storage
circa 1971,

I was of course vindicated ten years on when "underpowered" PCs and
the Apple II started to replace the big mainframes. The 1401 was of
course a mainframe, but it was under powered with an 11.5 millisecond
[sic] cycle time and in our config only 8K [sic] of storage. I chortle
when younger but aging geeks brag about their commodores and radio
shack boxes with "only" 128K,
>
> --
> __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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