FPUs for small computers (Was: What to download for a PDP-8)

[Tim Shoppa]

"Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> On 17 Oct 2007 at 12:09, Jim Battle wrote:
>
> > Finally, I recall seeing an article where somebody took a pocket 
> > calculator chip and essentially poked simulated keystrokes at it and 
> > then decoded the LED driver output to determine the answer.  It was very 
> > slow, though, so all it saved was the space of the floating point 
> > library code.
>
> I remember that one.  It may have been an early issue of Byte.  I 
> also wondered at the time if any speed was gained over just running 
> plain old x80 code.

This had a couple of S-100 incarnations, one by an outfit known
as Mini-Micro-Mart. In the 1975 timeframe when you had a few K
of memory in a S-100 system it made at least a little sense.

Later extrapolations used a AMD 9511/9512 chip, as in the
Compupro System Support, and boards by TDL and Northstar. That
was a very expensive chip whenever I saw it for sale :-).

Tim.