For those that, like me, have just woken up and are a bit confused: "Shirriff retells the story of the calculator's genesis by *noting*"
Google chap reverse engineers Sinclair Scientific Calculator
A Google employee named Ken Shirriff has delved into computing history by reverse-engineering the code running Sinclair Radionics' 1974 scientific calculator. Shirriff's story of the calculator's genesis notes that in the early 1970s a scientific calculator was an expensive and extraordinary tool for which the likes of HP …
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Monday 2nd September 2013 14:03 GMT Dave 126
Re: @AC: 08:31 (was: Been there, done that. In 1985.)
Exactly. Posts along the line of "I did X way back in Y" are interesting if they contain some details; indeed, it is in hope of finding comments from those more experienced and wiser than myself that I read the Reg comments section in the first place.
However, if a RegReader makes reference to something interesting but provides no further detail, then it can only really frustrate us fellow commentards, in much the same way as reading an intriguing headline but then finding the article locked behind a paywall.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 15:21 GMT Jared Hunt
Re: @Dave 126 (was: Been there, done that. In 1985.)
Dave, who needs details when you've lead such a rich and varied life as Jake here?
Jake Breeds & trains Cop dogs & horses and is Qualified to Judge Best In Show at American Kennel Club shows
Has friends in South Korea
Was a friend and neighbour of Steve Jobs and has his signature carved in his picnic table
Worked on spacecraft software/firmware
Mentored the founders of Google
Helped work out how to transfer the existing NCP ARPANet to the existing TCP/IP network
Has been Usenet & Mailinglist moderator for 30 years
Is a qualified pilot
Does track day driving
Has done arctic survival training and has eaten Lemming
Knows FORTRAN and COBOL
He ego-surfed the OSX source & found shit he re-wrote from AT&T source nearly 25 years ago
Has been making money from his knowledge of the PDP11 family since 1979
Has an extensive gun collection, was shooting gophers before he was in kindergarten and can fire his Great Grandfather's Kentucky over twice a minute
Watched a guy get killed by a claw hammer thrown from 35 feet up in Humboldt County
Watched a friend once won a bar bet by sticking 7 of 10 Craftsman brand screwdrivers into a straw archery butt at 15 yards in under 15 seconds
His kid/daughter (varies) is the Senior Member of the Technical Staff in a Fortune 150/250 (varies) corporation. She owns 6 horses, and is quite competitive in hunter/jumper, eventing & dressage
Can and has lived off the land, Makes road kill sausages several times a year, Owns a couple acres of Merlot grapes here that have Eucalyptus genes and grows Gravensteins (15 acres, originally planted by his great-grandfather)
Got kicked out of "Sunday School" when I was roughly 8 years old
Owns an outdoor 1875 stone bread oven
Owns a drilled-into-the-rock iron-ring tidal mooring on the Noyo River in Northern California. His Great Grandfather claimed it in 1872
Runs several "at risk yoof" camps every year.
Is a locksmith. Learned to pick locks before he was a teenager. Can open most house-hold doors with no more than a safety-pin & a bobby-pin.
Once could have shot the an intruder he had at chez jake, but when he got down to the kitchen, where he was, instead calmly put down his Kimber & picked up the phone & called the non-emergency police line. When they arrived, called off the dogs & he was transported to the hospital to stop the bleeding.
Can still read text/code on cards and tape, and sometimes "think" in octal and hex. A partially sighted friend can read punched paper with her fingers, similar to braille.
Accepted 7 contracts in the last 18 months pulling corporations out of the clouds. It's actually quite lucrative (apparently)
Has never has used google/youtube. Ever.
I for one think we have a great deal to learn from this man.
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Tuesday 3rd September 2013 08:32 GMT codeusirae
Yet more Jake quotes.
Has several degrees including the MBA ("I got mine in about 18 months").
Attended Stanford University and was admonish by the Deen for correcting the Professor in class.
Was a TA for the Google founders.
Worked on transfering NCP ARPANet to TCP/IP.
Was a personal associate with Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs carved his name into Jakes picnic table.
Is a trained pilot, "I got my ticket off of Sutton Bank in the early 1970s, and am still a member of The Yorkshire Gliding Club".
Been contributing to the Linux kernel for about 21 years.
Worked at DEC when Ken Olsen fired someone for 'walking' the washing machine sized disk drive across the floor.
Sat on "various panels of industry professionals MS brought in for input (large, medium, small and home) in the couple decades prior to 2000".
Posesses multiple server "boxes" in different locations, Palo Alto, New York, at Sun, Palo Alto, Edinburgh, Auckland, Duluth and Nyack.
WTC: "Had gear on top of both towers, and in the basements of both (and at Sun, on floors 25 and 26 WTC2)".
WRC, helped with the rescue: "A couple dogs I had trained were involved in the search and rescue effort".
WRTC, rebuilt the infrastructure: "a couple dozen of us were awake for about a week, cat-napping occasionally, rebuilding the logical infrastructure manually".
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Monday 2nd September 2013 20:42 GMT Chris Miller
Re: Been there, done that. In 1985.
jake applied to work for my (entirely fictional) Silicon Valley startup. I retained a copy of his CV:
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Kenyan refugees. I write award winning operas and manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for 3 days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed and I cook 30 minute brownies in 20 minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I had trials with Manchester United, I am the subject of numerous documentaries.
When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my garden, I enjoy urban hand gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I have been awarded both the Fields Medal and the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst and a ruthless bookie. I have provided confidential intelligence advice to the last four Presidents.
Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. Last Summer I toured Eastern Europe with a travelling centrifugal force demonstration. I run the 100m in 9.65 seconds. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles.
Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down.
I have made extraordinary four course meals using only some vegetables and a Breville Toaster. I breed prize winning clams.
I have won bullfights in Madrid, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka and chess competitions at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery and I have spoken with Elvis.
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Tuesday 3rd September 2013 07:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Been there, done that. In 1985.- (entirely fictional)
Seems pretty par for the course for the CV of anyone under 25, these days.
Though to be fair there was the middle aged guy who applied to us once for a sales job, and I had to phone him up and ask him "with this CV, why aren't you running Unilever?"
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Monday 2nd September 2013 07:00 GMT Neil Barnes
The perfect calculator!
You think not? How many of the kids at school ever borrowed it a *second* time?
My first calculator... and the RPN led me eventually to Forth and the three or four HP calculators I still use. *Loved* that odd red/purple colour in the LEDs.
Though the maddest thing I ever did to it was to dismember the thing when the keyboard finally died, and use it as a co-processor for (ahem) a Sinclair MK14... with transistors being driven to simulate keypresses and a small amount of hardware to decode the multiplexed LED output. Still got the MK14 but the Scientific is long in silicon heaven.
It would probably have been quicker to have written the routines directly. My word it was sloooooooooooooooooooow!
Kudos to Mr Shirriff.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 09:48 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: The perfect calculator!
How many of the kids at school ever borrowed it a *second* time?
I was going to say the same; the most frequent refrain after "lend us your calculator" was "where's the equals button?"
I still have mine. I think it's a lovely design but, beyond having to grapple with RPN, it had two problems; poor battery contacts and the sliding power button had prongs sliding over PCB tracking which were not good at withstanding wear.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 12:16 GMT Phil O'Sophical
Re: The perfect calculator!
My Mum bought me the kit, it still works today although I have had to resolder both the battery contacts and repair the sliding switch. The transfer with Pi/e/etc. on it has worn off, but the rest of the case is in good shape.
A little later one of my friends got the upgraded Cambridge Scientific (faster, and not RPN) and his came in a hard plastic case instead of a purple cloth bag. I wrote to Sinclair asking if it was possible to buy a case, and they sent me one for free :) Nice service.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 17:01 GMT Stoneshop
Re: The perfect calculator!
I was going to say the same; the most frequent refrain after "lend us your calculator" was "where's the equals button?"
One particularly obnoxious and ignorant twit, whose sense of entitlement apparently extended to me supplying him with a calculator, took about five minutes of key-pounding (this was an HP29; it could take the abuse) before latching on to the lack of the equals key. He then demanded "a normal calculator".
"Here, have my slide rule".
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Monday 2nd September 2013 15:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The perfect calculator!
How many of the kids at school ever borrowed it a *second* time?
I had loads of fun in school with my dad's hand-me-down HP scientific calcs.
One of the best things was to put it in octal mode before someone borrowed it:
"4 * 25"
"124"
*anywhere from two minutes to one day later*
"Hey, what's up with your stupid calculator?!"
Hex was pretty cool for that, too:
[guy] "Uh, I think this thing is broken - it says that nine times seven is 3F?!"
[me, switching mode surreptitiously as I take the calculator from him] "Uh, no, it says 63. Are you feeling all right?"
[guy] ****?
I amused quite a few kids for a long time by writing a program for the HP 12C which was essentially a random number generator, but by dint of technobabble and force of will I convinced people that if they typed yes or no questions into the calculator in a certain way (using numeric substitution for letters) that it would answer correctly. People took it surprisingly seriously; had I been cannier, I could probably have printed money... Oh well.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 08:06 GMT Julian 4
Squeezetastic
The Sinclair Scientific was a true engineering triumph: squeezing the UI and operation of a scientific calculator into just 320 x 11-bit program steps written in just 3 days from a hotel in Texas (how on earth did they test it?).
But it explains why Sinclair thought floating point would be trivial for his series of computers: if you can fit it into <0.4Kb* then it should have been no problem fitting into his second computer (as he promised) given its expansive 4Kb Super-ROM... but users had to wait for the 8K ROM ZX81 before that kind of luxury became available (the MK14 was his first computer).
Ken's post is brilliant, all the more amazing for the fact that we now know more about the Sinclair Scientific then we ever did, 39 years after it came out; and gain a better insight for why Sir Clive Sinclair was seen as the (eccentric) 1970s genius instead of the 80s techie front-man. Digital archeology at its best!
-cheers from Julz
[* 320x11-bits is about 440 bytes]
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Monday 2nd September 2013 09:49 GMT LazyLazyman
Re: Luxury!
Fingers! The luxury! When I were a lad our fingers were worn down to stumps from workin' in mine 25 hours a day! We had to do integration using naught but a bit of slate and a stick and if we got it wrong our da' would beat us to death, and we would still be up in mornin' down pit minin' hot lava for lava mills!
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Monday 2nd September 2013 11:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Luxury!
Mud! Stumps! Village Idiot...
Eeeh the luxury you lot had, we used to dream of finger stumps, we'd eaten our fingers long before then to stave off the cold.
Mud was something only the posh people had, we had to make do with rocks, no water mind you, couldn't afford it, we'd bash them together to try and get some protein out of them, made a loverly gruel and kept you regular,
And I was the Village Idiot....
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Monday 2nd September 2013 08:45 GMT Neil 44
Soldering exercise
I remember building mine - only way I could afford it!
I also remember having a transformer in a box with a small PCB and a reused earphone lead that plugged into an additional socket to power it from mains.
People used to laugh at the "almost accurate" answers (2/2*2 didn't come back as 2 from what I remember)
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Monday 2nd September 2013 13:12 GMT Steven Jones
Re: Soldering exercise
I seem to remember that I got my self-build kit through a cheap offer in Electronics Today International. I was in my first year studying physics at Imperial College at the time, and everybody lusted after the HP calculators in the labs (solidly fixed in their cradles with security cables).
Of course the Sinclair shared RPN with the HP, but, besides lack of functions, suffered from lack of accuracy (only about three-and-a-half significant figures could be relied upon in practice). From what I recall, and involved some very convoluted exercises to do something as simple as produce the inverse of the number currently displayed. Of course, in a year or so, you could buy fully-fledged scientific calculators for pocket money.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 09:20 GMT Tony Green
A bargain as a kit
It was fifty quid if you bought the ready-made one. But you could buy a kit and build it yourself for £16, which as an apprentice telephone engineer at the time was the same as my weekly gross wage. And extra geek points (before we'd even HEARD of geek points) for having built it yourself.
Funny thing about its use of RPN was that although it was hard to get used to, once you did it was very hard to get used to "normal" calculator operations. Rather like the way I now instinctively find myself using vi key-sequences whatever I'm editing in.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 20:48 GMT Ian 55
Despite all the downvotes, you are right - see the Black Watch (almost impossible to build yourself because of how tightly the components were squeezed in, and with a MTBF of about five minutes, you stood a 50-50 chance of exhausting the battery before it died forever), the calculators with nearly but not quite all the precision and speed of doing it via a slide rule, the much-loved but compared to an Apple ][, Atari 800 or BBC Micro really rather crap home micros, or projects like the MicroDrive or the washing machine on wheels...
.. but they are still loved. It's clearly not just Apple that has the fanbois, and Sinclair stuff was cheaper.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 18:52 GMT Alan W. Rateliff, II
Re: One in front of me now.
I know that feeling. At the same time, though, if you cannot build up the courage now, will you ever? If it's left behind after you, would you prefer that someone with noob hands give a go at it, supervised only by your spiritual presence?
If it's meant to be just a display piece, no problem. But I can feel the niggling in your heart. Deep down in some deep corner of your psyche, eating away... no, screaming... at you every time you lay your eyes on its wondrously beautiful and tantalizing enclosure, even just out of the corner of your eyes, until one day you realize that while in those boring meetings you're doodling it, tracing its silhouette over and over again on your note pad. You start seeing it everywhere you look. It haunts your daily existence. The batteries... they're so close, and yet the distance you put between them is agonizing.
Dude... I know that feeling.
Paris, hooked on a feeling.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 10:04 GMT Mr C
long lost art of efficient programming
I enjoyed reading the paper, its nicely written, and it has a nice debugger if you're into that kind of thing.
Loved the part where it says "Calling NORMALIZE would have fixed this, but there wasn't space for the call" which just shows how tight everything was back then.
Today you'll be hard-pressed to find people that are adept at designing efficient algorithms of any kind.
"Install more memory" seems to be the mantra by which many designers live these days.
"Get a faster CPU" or "Get a bigger HD" also is exceedingly popular.
I miss the old days
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Monday 2nd September 2013 10:32 GMT JDX
Re: long lost art of efficient programming
Clever efficient programmers are all over the place still. But clever, efficient programming is a tool to use when needed rather than all the time - if your input requirements mean a simple O(N^2) solution is perfectly fine then why spend an extra two days writing a convoluted O(NlogN) one. They didn't do this for fun back in the old days, but because it was essential - nowadays we still do it when it's essential.
You don't rebuild your Ford Focus engine and tune it because it doesn't actually make your commute to work any quicker. But you do your track car.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 11:34 GMT Jim 59
Re: long lost art of efficient programming
@JDX true but the mega-corps just rely on Moore's law to make their mega-inefficient code actually work. This is why knocking up a quick CV on your 2013 laptop looks and feels largely the same as knocking up a quick CV on your 1993 pc, just the code is 1000 bigger and 1000 slower but the hardware is also 1000 times faster.
If Windows 8 was written with the same level of dedication as that calculator, it would have enough power to go into orbit. Unfortunately is would also take 100 years ti write.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 11:52 GMT Mr C
Re: long lost art of efficient programming
I remember this application which was popular in the 80ies-90ies, "Norton Commander" or NC for short.
A kind of file explorer back in the DOS days based on a character GUI.
I remember everyone using it, but over time it grew and grew and got bloated until it didn't fit on a floppy any more.
Then someone walked in with something called "Volkov Commander" -VC for short
Now, this was a 100% rip-off from the original, except that it was written by some Ukrainian dude (if memory server), and in the Ukraine back in those days they didn't have the PCs we had here in the west, so that poor guy on his crappy machine decided to write his own version that worked on machines with low specs.
I have never forgotten, and each time something like this comes up i remember VC!
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Monday 2nd September 2013 20:03 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: long lost art of efficient programming
Anyone else remember the 'One Liners' programming contests of 30+ years ago? One line of BASIC being about 240 characters, varying slightly depending on which brand of affordable pre-PC home computer you had in the very late 1970s or early- to mid-1980s.
I wrote a cute little video game (one line!), and also a (text) adventure game *engine* (one line!, but needing an additional DATA statement for each dark and scary room).
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Monday 2nd September 2013 16:13 GMT MrT
PP3...
... I had an old HP LED calculator - wedge shape, clicky buttons like an Oric 1 IIRC - that took 6xAAA, but worked just as well with a PP3 wired up across the first and last contact and fixed with black insulation tape on the top behind the screen. A bit cheaper to power than finding the right cells.
I later replaced it with the powerhouse that was the original Casio fx-82 ... and remember the cold flush of jealously when later beaten by fx-100 users on the "1++1=========(etc...)" race to 100.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 13:17 GMT Nigel 11
$400 for the competition??
I can't remember the exact year, but I remember that when I was in the market for my first scientific calculator (as a schoolkid), the competition was between the Sinclair and the Commodore SR-36 at about twice the price. I bought the Commodore (for a vaguely-remembered £59? ), and never regretted it. Everything worked perfectly right through to about 2005(*), during which time I never felt a need to buy another calculator. I think it was the keyboard which proclaimed "quality" just as the Sinclair one proclaimed "cheap, nasty".
The Commodore SR-36 was a real class act.
(*) except the rechargeable battery, whch I had to replace a couple of times (screwdriver and soldering iron required).
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Monday 2nd September 2013 13:29 GMT Quentin North
Divide by zero
Pleased to see that the emulator has the divide by zero bug, although does not emulate it correctly. Divide by zero was possible on the Sinclair scientific resulting in the display of a count down or general numerical iteration. From memory this never stopped until you powered off, but the emulator seems to reach an input state after a short series of iterations.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 14:54 GMT Mage
Roundworld's Bergholt Stuttley Johnson
Almost every Sinclair Product had a touch of genius but fatally flawed. If the design didn't have a flaw then it would be a failure due to poor production (Amstrad was horrified at the Production when he bought them).
Micro Smallest Radio (which wasn't even before it came out). TRF Reflex.
Grossly exaggerated specs of sub spec IC10 (Plessey) and IC12 (Texas)
Watch almost impossible to fit in case
Three iterations of pocket TVs with different flaws (oddly the first one the main flaw was too expensive, rare for Sinclair 2nd flaw battery. Last model was obsolete at release by LCD and Sony had better "flat" CRT to market first).
Wobbling RAM packs
QL "tape" cartridges
C5 bike using Washing machine motor.
We need people like Sinclair, but with better attention to Production Engineering and Quality.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 15:17 GMT Alan Sharkey
Well, I found the article interesting.
Back in the old days, I used to have to program everything to fit in 32K of memory (old DG RDOS). It was amazing what you could do if you had a modicom of knowledge about the processor and registers.
And yes, I did do RPN programming so the end user could enter their own formula (for oil well pressure analysis) and it would RPN it to act on the the data gathered. I was quite proud of that considering I wrote it back before we had spreadsheets.
Alan [No there are no links - it was way before we had any internet]
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Monday 2nd September 2013 17:11 GMT John Smith 19
Wow. I thought the *hard* part was getting it to run for the length of time on 2 AAs
Basically by delivering short pulses at around 200Khz to the chip as (IIRC) this puppy is NMOS, not CMOS
I think that qualifies it for being the worlds first battery switched mode PSU in a consumer product (but I cannot swear to it).
I thought they just bought the chip and stuck in the board. I'd no idea the chip was even programmable.
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Tuesday 3rd September 2013 08:29 GMT Andus McCoatover
Still got one, somewhere...
Helped me through my City&Guilds telecomm Full Tech. Cert. exam.
(Although my Grandfathers 'slip-stick' - slide rule - was what I used for the exams. More accurate, if my glasses were clean...)
Now, all I need is to find new batteries for my still-functional RPN Hewlett-Packard HP35 (Still with original leather pouch)
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Wednesday 4th September 2013 05:05 GMT Alan W. Rateliff, II
I know that feeling. At the same time, though, if you cannot build up the courage now, will you ever? If it's left behind after you, would you prefer that someone with noob hands give a go at it, supervised only by your spiritual presence?
If it's meant to be just a display piece, no problem. But I can feel the niggling in your heart. Deep down in some deep corner of your psyche, eating away... no, screaming... at you every time you lay your eyes on its wondrously beautiful and tantalizing enclosure, even just out of the corner of your eyes, until one day you realize that while in those boring meetings you're doodling it, tracing its silhouette over and over again on your note pad. You start seeing it everywhere you look. It haunts your daily existence. The batteries... they're so close, and yet the distance you put between them is agonizing.
Dude... I know that feeling.
Paris, hooked on a feeling.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
