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Re: Is binary a "language"?

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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

#211 — Re: Is binary a "language"?

On Mar 24, 3:18 am, Willem <wil...@toad.stack.nl> wrote:
> Todd Carnes wrote:
>
> ) If you accept the definition of "language" as "a particular kind of
> ) system for encoding and decoding information", which is one of the
> ) definitions given athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language, then
> ) "binary" DOES qualify as a language.
>
> No it doesn't.  Not by itself.  You also need a system to assign
> informational meanings to the encoding.  That system is the language.
>
> In other words: You can't encode information with binary *alone*, you
> also need some kind of definition/system that tells you what the binary
> endocing *means*.

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.

Autism is the failure to recognize abbreviated informal ways of
speaking. Get help.
>
> SaSW, Willem
> --
> Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
>             made in the above text. For all I know I might be
>             drugged or something..
>             No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
> #EOT

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#214

spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@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.  


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#215

"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. 

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#217

"osmium" <r124c4u102@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.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#218

"Pascal J. Bourguignon" wrote:

> "osmium" <r124c4u102@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.

Excellent!  That jogs my memory. 

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#232

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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#233

"spinoza1111" <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:29fc0345-1b7b-4e11-bcfe-bde8adebae93@v33g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
> 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"
> ..."

> 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.

They might have used binary in the same way that an abacus uses binary: each 
'ring' is either on the left or right; 3 rings on the right is '3'. So 3 
flip-flops on might similarly represent '3'. Otherwise only 4 flip-flops 
would be needed.

I doubt any 'decimal electronic computer' actually stored a decimal digit 
using an analogue quantity.

-- 
Bartc 

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#241

On Apr 15, 9:40 pm, "BartC" <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
> "spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> news:29fc0345-1b7b-4e11-bcfe-bde8adebae93@v33g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > 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"
> > ..."
> > 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.
>
> They might have used binary in the same way that an abacus uses binary: each
> 'ring' is either on the left or right; 3 rings on the right is '3'. So 3
> flip-flops on might similarly represent '3'. Otherwise only 4 flip-flops
> would be needed.
>
> I doubt any 'decimal electronic computer' actually stored a decimal digit
> using an analogue quantity.

I believe that in nearly all cases combinations of two state flip
flops (not the sandal the bistable tube), then magnetic cores having
only two directions of magnetization, and so on, were used, never an n-
state device where n is an integer > 2, nor an analogue device where n
is Cantorian aleph 1.

Except perhaps in hybrid analogue computers but in these the existence
of "memory" is hard to separate from "nature".
>
> --
> Bartc

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#235

spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> writes:

> 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.


The flip-flops weren't used to store bits, but to emulate in hardware
the workings of a mechanical adding machines.

Thanks to pointing this out, it's even funnier.

While the ENIAC was a decimal computer, it indeed used binary
components, but wired in such a way as to provide ten-state hardware.

It's funny how they choosed this more complex set-up than a purely
binary design.  A clear case of "width of the shuttle".
http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html


So we'll have to fall back to the Russians's Сетунь for the development
of a ternary, 3-state electronic tubes-based computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm



-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#243

On Apr 16, 1:23 am, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
wrote:
> spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> > 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.
>
> The flip-flops weren't used to store bits, but to emulate in hardware
> the workings of a mechanical adding machines.
>
> Thanks to pointing this out, it's even funnier.
>
> While the ENIAC was a decimal computer, it indeed used binary
> components, but wired in such a way as to provide ten-state hardware.

Which is why Brits patriotically say that the first "real" computer
was "invented" in Manchester. The ENIAC was arguably an elaborate
adding machine. Whirlwind was a stealth effort to build a computer but
the US Navy was told that it would only be a flight simulator. The
early US computers were inelegant by comparision to the Manchester
machine and Zuse's Nazi computer.
>
> It's funny how they choosed this more complex set-up than a purely
> binary design.  A clear case of "width of the shuttle".http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html
>
> So we'll have to fall back to the Russians's Сетунь for the development
> of a ternary, 3-state electronic tubes-based computer.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setunhttp://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm

Perhaps the Russians thought a tristable device was Marxist. You know,
thesis, antithesis and synthesis being the tristable dialectic.
>
> --
> __Pascal Bourguignon__                    http://www.informatimago.com/
> A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#245

spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> writes:

>> So we'll have to fall back to the Russians's Сетунь for the development
>> of a ternary, 3-state electronic tubes-based computer.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setunhttp://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
>
> Perhaps the Russians thought a tristable device was Marxist. You know,
> thesis, antithesis and synthesis being the tristable dialectic.

They definitely did this as an anti-capitalist move.
But then, their IBM-cloning industry got successful. :-)

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#253

On 4/12/2011 8:00 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> "osmium"<r124c4u102@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.

Let's get precise here.

Yes, there were digital computers that computed in base 10.  The link above 
describes a computer that used tubes to store binary coded decimal where 8 tubes 
formed 4 flip-flops to store a digit, not a tube with 10 states.

Regarding 6-bit BCD machines (mentioned earlier), I used an IBM 1620 years ago. 
  Each addressable location held a BCD value (with special meaning for some of 
the values 10-15), a flag bit (for terminating a variable length field), and a 
parity bit.  Circuits used discrete transistors.

-- 
Thad

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#231

On Apr 12, 10:46 pm, "osmium" <r124c4u...@comcast.net> wrote:
> "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.

My ancient copy of G Gordon Bell and Allen Newell's book COMPUTER
STRUCTURES: READINGS AND EXAMPLES, which survived Fiji and China and
rain, declares in fact that no electronic digital computer as of its
publication date 1973 ever had an n-stable device where n>2 as its
fundamental memory unit. Instead, at this time, the silly idea still
existed that "scientific" data processing had "low input/output  but
high computation" requirements whereas "business" data processing had
"high I/O but low computation" requirements, so, prior to the IBM
360's introduction in 1964, a series of IBM machines, and machines
from Honeywell and RCA, were flogged as "decimal" machines.

The idea was silly for several reasons. It predated the introduction
of high volume data processing for science although even in 1973,
simulating nuclear tests probably and I think involved a lot of data
processing. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the elaboration of the
tax code, and various forms of everyday bullshit were making business
and government data processing algorithms more complicated, one result
being that they were never programmed properly in many instances due
to the anti-intellectuality of the typical business or government data
processing manager.

Bell and Newell failed, of course, to take into account all
developments in the Eastern Bloc at the time, so they may not have
known of n-stable devices where n>2 being developed in the Soviet
Union or Mao's China.

[The history of computing and data processing in China in the Mao
times might be quite interesting. How many bits does it take to fully
encode, say, a limited set of Maoist-simplified Chinese characters in
terms, I'd imagine, of a set of instructions for writing the
character? A Taschen art book on world computing and its images shows
Chinese scientists in 1949, either Guomindang or Communist, probably
depending on the month of that year (China going Communist in October)
clustered 'round a "Chinese" computer.]

But for n-stable where n>2 I think you need to go all the way back to
electromechanical calculators and telephone switches. Even the first
purely electronic device, the vacuum tubes we used to mess with as
kids, was bistable. It was so unreliable that if n had exceeded two it
would suck.

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#230

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.

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.

>
> --
> __Pascal Bourguignon__                    http://www.informatimago.com/
> A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#234

spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@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.


> 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.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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#242

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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