Hello Miles!

10 Jan 05 05:22, you wrote to me:

 MM> G'morning Bo,

 BS>>> Righty.. And then a good old calculator could solve it. :)
 MM>> Goodo - so what are the first two payments ?
 BS>> The good calculator is gone. I did have a Texas Instrument
 BS>> TI-83, the best calculator ever, but borrowed it to a
 BS>> friend, and haven't seen it since.

 MM> I lose many books that way - but never a calculator !  They seem
 MM> to wear out or drop dead;  the best I ever had was a Casio Pro-101
 MM> with 256 programmable steps...

Okay. I did have a casio electronic address book, it was cool. :)

 MM> That brings back memories;  I had developed a very cute routine
 MM> for working out the total coverage of any group of media used
 MM> together in an advertising campaign - that worked very well in
 MM> Fortran on an IBM 1800 owned by a bureau.   The Casio came with a
 MM> lecturing job at Auckland Technical Institute,  and I became
 MM> obsessed with fitting the essense of the routine into 256 steps.

Aha. Fortran 77? :) BTW People are still using Fortran in Universities,
especially in Chemstry and Physics, I think it's unbelievable. :-)

 MM> Eventually, it came down to needing 258 steps to complete
 MM> properly, so I had it run into an error condition that left the
 MM> essential answer sitting on its display - even the machine had to
 MM> be reset to do another calculation.

 MM> However,  that was enough to demonstrate the process.  I won a
 MM> commission to programme the routine into some HP programmables and
 MM> sold copies to newspapers in Australia and New Zealand...

Aha, cool. :)

Bo


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