ignatz@ihuxx.UUCP (07/14/83)
Just FYI...concerning the 'HP calculators...that had undocumented timers'... The HP-55 had a documented stopwatch. By pressing three keys simultaneously, the HP-45 went into stopwatch mode, too. The difference was that the clock was calibrated for the HP-55; the one on the HP-45, while not too far off, was uncalibrated. I calculated the error, and found it to be linear, and so wrote a little post-processing program which gave me an accurate stopwatch. At least, until someone stole the calculator. Oh, yes...on the UNIVAC 1100 series thing...I didn't hear about UNIVAC's government problems; what a UNIVAC rep told me, when I was at IIT (bastion of the UNIVAC 1108, then 1100/81, till this year) was that the 1100 series was a hush-hush project to pile into IBM's market. At the time they were designing the 1100, the leading IBM was a 36-bit oriented machine; he mentioned the model number, and 1400 seems right, but *DON'T* hold me to it. IBM-types let me know the real number. (Ever notice how IBMmers talk in alpha ssoup, even more than the rest of us?) Anyway, this thing was supposed to be code-compatibble with the IBM product, and be a real screamer. Just weeks before product annoucement, IBM announced that it was getting out of the heavy number-crunching biz, and lookit our new 360, 32-bit machine... Poor UNIVAC... Dave Ihnat ihuxx!ignatz