Oddest mismatch in hardware for a given purpose...

[Josh Dersch]

Jules Richardson wrote:
> 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 :-)

It has an external power input, via some weird connector on the side.  
It _does_ have a "high speed" mode -- if you turn it on while holding 
"+" it runs 6 or 7 times faster (tested by running a program that just 
runs a FOR loop from 0 to 1000 -- ~28 seconds in "normal" mode, ~4 
seconds in "high speed" mode).  No idea how it affects battery life, but 
I can't imagine it's good :).
>
>> (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.

:)

Josh
>
> ;-)
>
>
>
>