(11C) (15C) Very fast binary converter + fast modulo

[John Keith]

(03-03-2024 08:53 PM)johnb Wrote:  Too many software engineers who grew up on Intel CPU chips assume that every digital computer has always been:
* binary
* two's complement
* little-endian
* "reals" represented by "mantissa & exponent" floating point
* hardware-implementation of subroutine call stack
* protected memory
etc...

The long road of computing development is far more interesting than that, however, and it's fascinating to sometimes find remnants of that in calculators or other interesting pieces of hardware!

(Yes, there have been machines that did base-10 in hardware (ENIAC was one!), or used one's complement or even weirder representations; fixed-point approximations of reals; other formats such as numerator/denominator; no hardware stack; no "call" or "return" instructions; flat address space; weird multiple address spaces; et cetera.)

One of the more interesting ones: balanced ternary.