"JAXAshby" wrote in message
...
so, how come you didn't know that CDC made computers in the 1950's?

You never asked. Your claim was that all computers had FPUs so it was
unnecessary to code floating point. The fact that some computers had it is
irrelevant. Most did not.

BTW, CDC was founded late in the 50s; I'm not sure they actually shipped a
machine with floating point until the mid '60s.


btw, you "home" computer was 11/23 in the early 80's?

Sure, why not? It only cost a few thousand dollars, used. Besides, my partner
and I had a small company -we didn't rent an office for 2 years. He worked on
the DG at his house, I had the DEC at mine. These were floppy based machines,
without a lot of memory and certainly no FPU. A small disk, like an RL02 (10
meg "top loader") went for around $25,000, much more than the computer. We got
our first in '82 from Apple computer, as payment for porting our software to the
not-yet-released "Lisa," which I guess was our third computer. A Compaq
"luggable" came in 1983, a microVax and a Sun soon followed.

Actually, around 1972 I had at home an IBM 2741 Selectric terminal with a 134.5
baud modem that I could dial into Multics developement system at MIT, but that's
another story.


sure, and you traveled to junior high school on a hydrazine rocket.

That's silly. I teleported.


btw, how many wires on a "discrete" transitor used on a CDC machine? careful
how you speak, for my brother worked the technical end of CDC for over 30
years.

I don't remember, it was about 35 years ago, although 3 wires would be a good
guess for a transistor. I dealt with it at the "gate" level, not the individual
transistors. I think it was a CDC 3000. IIRC, the logic was on small boards
that each had 2 flip-flops, which probably had 2 transistors each. The back of
it was a *lot* of wire wrap. I'd guess around 30,000 "gates" in the machine,
but I could be way off. The logic book was several inches thick, with timing
charts and logic diagrams. ("On the leading edge of this signal, the data from
register x would be latched into buffer y ...") So jaxie, send this off to your
brother and ask him if its a fair description, given that I spent a few weeks
with the machine 35 years ago.



[snip the junk wherein jeffies tries to cover that even to this moment he
doesn't know even WHAT it means to calculate *algebraicly* the nth root of a
number, something every last person with degree in physics [which jeffies
claims to have] knew thoroughly before the graduated high school]

jeffies, you are hopeless. Even now you don't have a clew that you were set
up
with bait a high school kid would have seen from a thousand yards.