Oddest mismatch in hardware for a given purpose...

[Jules Richardson]

Josh Dersch wrote:
> Internally though, they're 100% different -- the processor in the MK-85 
> is a Russian PDP-11 knockoff.  It's not a power-efficient CPU by any 
> means, so to ensure decent battery life the CPU speed is severely 
> limited.  Not sure exactly what speed it runs at (anyone out there 
> know?) but the result is by far the slowest calculator I've ever used.  

That's interesting. Does it have provision for AC input? Just curious if it 
auto-magically ups the clock speed when not running from the battery, as that 
would be kinda cool (and an early example of a power-saving mode :-)

> (The BASIC implementation is also incredibly buggy, mostly due to poor 
> argument checking... see http://www.pisi.com.pl/piotr433/mk85mc1e.htm 
> for a cool example of exploiting a bug in INPUT to do machine-language 
> coding, in a way only a contortionist could love...)

Gah, one of the home micro BASICs did something similar, so you could throw MC 
in there as a character string and 'trick' the BASIC into executing it by 
tripping the parser up - but my brain's refusing to tell me which one it was now.

> Anyone else know of examples of odd-duck machines like this, where the 
 > hardware is probably not the best choice for the application?

Anything ever done using an IBM-compatible PC?

>  (But it's cool anyway?)

Oh. Scratch that, then.

;-)