Wozniak and AOS Message #10 Posted by Palmer O. Hanson, Jr. on 12 May 2006, 3:33 a.m., in response to message #4 by Andy Morales
Go to www.woz.org/letters/general/57.html and read to the end to find the following discussion of AOS by Wozniak:
"... At Hewlett Packard we were so proud that our calculators, the first scientific ones ever, were years ahead of competition. They used postfix partly because the least logic or ROM chips were quite expensive back then. It would have taken extra keys and an infix to postfix translator to use infix. Also, a larger and more expensive desktop HP machine from the division in Colorado Springs used postfix, for the same reasons. The HP-35 was an attempt to miniaturize this machine.
Our marketing department had a card with a monstrous formula to demonstrate how powerful our calculators were and what postfix calculation was capable of. They challenged people to solve it on a slide rule the normal way. Well, we could all solve it on our HP calculators but it took a few tries to get the steps accurate enough, there were so many of them.
Finally Texas Instruments introduced an infix 'algebraic entry' scientific calculator. The first one showed up in our lab one day. We were all pooh-poohing it and laughing at the arithmetic entry as being too weak for engineers. Someone pulled out our big formula challenge and we all laughed, sure that nobody could ever do it with the TI calculator. A challenge went up for someone to try. After a short silence I said that I'd try.
Well I started staring at the formula and looking at the keys and trying to decide which steps to calculate first, as you would do with an HP calculator. I finally realized that I'd never be able to solve the formula this way. With my fellow engineers watching I was very self conscious but I wanted to succeed. I managed to let go of my thinking and then came up with a very amazing concept. I just copied the formula from left to right! This was such an incredible concept that I pressed the keys as fast as I could on the TI calculator, risking a wrong press but impressing my colleagues. I had to guess whether this calculator used the square root button as prefix or postfix but I guessed right and got the proper answer the first time.
My colleagues couldn't believe it. I told them that you just copy the formula from left to right but not one of them could see through their postfix fog. After all, these were the calculator experts of the world. They are well accustomed to thinking ahead and analyzing an expression to come up with the order of steps to take on an HP postfix calculator, and they had to remember which sub-expressions were in what order on the calculator's stack. None of them could do what I had done, forget that they have to be smart."
Actually, one really can't do exactly what Wozniak says with the old AOS machines; for example, one can't enter the square root command and follow it with the rest of the equation. Rather, the square root command has to follow the completion of the work under the square root sign in the equation. Also, AOS didn't offer implied multiplication. One gets much closer to the scenario he described once EOS came along in the TI-68, the TI graphic calculators and the Casio fx-7000G.
|