24 Oct
2011
24 Oct
'11
1:12 p.m.
Which is part of why VisiCalc appeared on the Apple II
first; the 6502
had a built-in "decimal" mode which did the calculations in BCD, which
Yes, but the Z80 has the DAA instruciton (Decimal Adjust Accumulator)
which provides similar functionality.
was a huge boon for business calculations. I seem to
recall the full
POWER instruction set (not the subset used on PowerPC) has a number of
decimal operations as well.
I think the HP custom processor used in the 9845 does too. THe high-speec
language processor option of this machine uses 2901 bit slice chips, but
there are also some BCD adders on one of the boards, presumably for
decimal instructions.
-tony