On 16 Aug, Tony Duell wrote: [I don't wane miss RPN ince I baught a HP 48SX in '92. And I was very happy to find a HP 41CV. Complete with mag card reader, thermo printer, video interface, doc and in very good condition.] What brand / model is it? Non HP RPN calculators seam to be really rare. I can recall a discussion about the first pure electronic calculator a while back. It was not a HP and it used RPN. That is the only non HP RPN calculator I know. -- tschuess, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz

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Louis Schulman wrote: I believe it is like the 25, in which I just had to cut it apart (a seam is visible), then glue back together. -- Terry Collins {:-)}}} Ph(02) 4627 2186 Fax(02) 4628 7861 email: terryc(a)woa.com.au www: http://www.woa.com.au WOA Computer Services <lan/wan, linux/unix, novell> "People without trees are like fish without clean water"

As I recall (it has been about 10 years ago, or so), I just needed a scientific calculator right away (for some reason) and my previous rpn HP had worn out. I went to buy an HP and I bought the cheapest HP scientific that the store had, assuming that it would be rpn. Who would have thought that HP would make a non-rpn calculator. I got it home and found out the bad news. Why I never bothered to return it, I don't recall. I like my 16C much better. That must be why the 20S still looks like new and the 16C is well worn... --tom

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On 18 Aug, Chuck McManis wrote: A Sun 2? You mean there is really a system inside that is compatible to the Sun 2 architekture of Sun Microsystems? If that is true, hmmm, there is a Sun2 port in NetBSD... :-) What OS is between the hardware and Mathematica? SunOS? Unix on a calculator? Tststs. -- tschuess, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz

At 12:45 PM 8/19/01 -0500, Jeffrey wrote: I must say that I haven't had any exposure to the TI system. However, I usually prefer to deal with most math in old fashion: pencil and paper, but usually after thinking about the nature and implications of the problem at hand. Keeps me in shape. I've had students who weren't in good shape after a couple of years of TI-assisted college, even though they were decent at algebra when they first enrolled. Note: I have nothing against using appropriate tools (symbolic math in this case). But I do think that if you overdo it, as in never using your brain again, then you definitely lose some of the training. "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers". Yes. But there must be some gray matter behind the eyeballs looking at the screen in order to be able to grasp the insight. I was a hard-core Maple user back when I had to manipulate expressions with thousands of terms in my misguided youth :-) . In fact, I started using Macsyma (running on an Apollo DN3000, on topic). At the time (or maybe a little after that era, I don't remember exact dates), there was Mathematica on the Macs, but they would freeze all too often because the computational kernel would eat all of the memory. Anyway, the point that I wanted to make was that years after I found that a different approach to the same problem would have resulted in expressions that were much more manageable. My original research was not wrong, but I had succeeded in making it more difficult than necessary by using symbolic math. carlos. -------------------------------------------------------------- Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo(a)nospammers.ieee.org

On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Sipke de Wal wrote: I wonder if it's possible to run MINIX on the TI-92? Hmm... the possibilities. Peace... Sridhar

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Actually, they built their own RPN calculators. My very first calc was a NS RPN scientific, back in '77 or '78 when I was in high school. Probably explains why I love RPN to this day...plus it had the added advantage that nobody wanted to borrow your calculator. "Where's the equals key?" "There isn't one." "Uh, never mind. Here's your calculator back." Paul Braun WD9GCO Cygnus Productions nerdware_nospam(a)laidbak.com "A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without a bunch of bricks tied to its head."

At 03:30 PM 8/18/2001 -0700, you wrote: There are some on Ebay right now: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1266188307

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On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Tony Duell wrote: This is only the case if you are taught this way, or do not develop skills beyond this method of programming. The only reason we all (or most of us at least) drive cars in a civilized manner is because we are taught to do so. If it was up to us to drive the way we wanted, imagine the choas (and fun) on the roadway. One has to start somewhere! This is the best way to learn. Or did you just pick up a soldering iron one day and simply know what to do? I don't think so. Trial and error is the best learning tool. Granted, if you want to become an engineer, or in the very least a "professional", you have to evolve beyond trial and error. But as I said, you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. I would never start a student off in a rigorous, structured environment. What a perfect way to turn them off. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

At 07:45 PM 8/17/01 -0700, Chuck wrote: Talk about that! Imagine a bunch of cars entering the highway from a side access, spaced about 9 ft apart at 60mph, without knowing if they will have to slow down (perhaps suddenly) because there aren't enough open spots in the highway traffic in order to merge in... -------------------------------------------------------------- Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo(a)nospammers.ieee.org

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote: Yes, but that's just part of his charm :) Seriously though, Mike is a good example of why I take the time and patience to understand even the most seemingly incomprehensible nerds. One could take him as being retarded, but in actuality he's a complete fucking genius who is so far above most peoples' intellects that we just can't understand the world he's in. Let's face it, some people in the computer world are socially lacking, but you stand to miss out on a lot if you don't take the time to try to connect with them. So no matter how annoying some people can be, I don't hold that against them, because somewhere behind that wall of inarticulation can be some pretty fascinating thought processes. 99% of the list don't know who Mike Kahn is, so for your edification, he's this little oriental guy with a Fu Manchu beard/mustache thing going on, who roams around the hamfests in the Sillycon Valley striking up endlessly babbling conversations with random victims causing them sometimes excrutiating uncomfortableness as they try to determine the most practical way to ditch him (I had to pass him off to Doug Coward at VCF 3.0 because I just had to get away; Doug later came to me asking me why I did that to him...sorry Doug! :) I met him around the time I was promoting VCF 2.0 when he was working on his Nintendo Mutilator (as he called it). At first I was thinking the guy was just completely insane, but I decided that there was probably something there beneath the surface worth getting at, so I stuck with the conversation. Eventually I would get antsy and figure out some fairly polite way to get rid of him. Anyway, it took me a few times in bumping into him at the ham fests to figure out that he was truly a unique and extremely gifted individual. It turns out he really was doing some interesting stuff with his Mutilator, which was really sort of an analog paradigm for programming on a digital computer. More specifically, it allows you to tweak a digital system using analog controls (potentiometers, sliders, etc). It also was the embodiment of a programming schema that exists and can only really be understood in his own mind, though you can see what he's getting at if you try hard enough. I think if some really high-up computer science guru like, say, Donald Knuth spent a month with him, two things would happen: 1) Donald Knuth would go insane but 2) before that they would probably have come up with a truly revolutionary new paradigm for software development. It also turns out that Mike invented a camera that can take highly contrasted pictures using only analog techniques (no digital processing) and in realtime. He showed me the patent he was awarded for it, as well as a picture he took with it of the burning Man at one of the Burning Man festivals at night where you could vividly see both the flames and all the activity around it. Not even the Minds of Minolta could come up with this, and he did. One smart mofo. So take the time to talk to the weirdos. Sometimes they are smarter than you think, you smug and arrogant bastards :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

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On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, John Allain wrote: I don't believe so. Although he would've made for a fascinating subject :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

It was thus said that the Great "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" once stated: In the early 90s I was in a Unix Systems Programming class, with prerequisites of Data Structures, Compiler Writing (undergrad level) and a working knowledge of C. In other words, it's an upper level course. So the professor was talking about how a program is typically laid out in memory when it's loaded and running---here's the text segment, here's the data segment, stack and heap. A student then raises her hand and the professor calls on her. ``Excuse me professor,'' she said. ``But where do the comments go?'' I've rarely seen the professor's expression on other people, and usually only when hit upside the head with a 2x4 [1]. It took him a full two minutes to finally recover and then he went onto a digression about the compilation process, something that should have sunk in during Compiler Writing. Heh. There were a few professors I had like that. One that taught Software Engineering, hated programming, and his stuff would only work on a machine that was infinitely fast and had an infinite amount of memory. I fortunately learned early on (even before college) that there were families of similar languages and there are only a few families: procedural (Fortran, BASIC, C, Pascal, Lisp, Forth), functional (Haskel, ML, /bin/sh (to a degree), Lisp, Forth), object oriented (which came out of procedural mostly, Smalltalk, C++, Jaba, Lisp, Forth), assembly (pick your chip) and Lisp (Lisp, Forth, Postscript). And once you know a few, picking up a new one is no big deal (okay, what's the syntatic surgar for this one?) -spc (And writing portable code is actually easy if you start out trying to write portable code ... )

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It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: But what if they can't? Here's an article about a researcher who applied genetic programming [1] techniques to building a circuit in an FPGA and ended up with a 32 gate result (to distinquich between two tones), with five gates seemingly unconnected yet crutial to the operation. The researcher doesn't fully understand *why* it works: http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordial.jsp -spc (Is uneasy with this but yet sees this as becoming more and more common ... ) [1] A method of evolving the best program to solve a particular problem. It takes several *solutions* and breeds the most promising ones to produce better offspring that get a better answer to the problem.