My "edict" for 2023 properly created September. So, "Yay for automation!"

I've been spending time re-organizing my Virtual II and Apple II archive to make it more useful. I don't recall exactly when I got rid of all my Apple II stuff, but when I did I went on a frenzy of downloading a lot of disk images, books, magazines and docs of any kind. I made some effort to configure a few Virtual II set-ups for Applesoft, UCSD Pascal and DOS 3.3 Integer BASIC. Then I went through some hard drive re-organization and basically increased the entropy, which was the opposite of what I'd intended.

So now I'm trying to fix that. And, of course, getting distracted by many things. Which is fine, because what am I doing that's so important?

This morning, on a whim, I played around with Michael Mahon's USR.SQR. I was up at 0445, so it seemed like the kind of thing one does in the quiet hours before dawn. I wrote a program to compute the square roots of the integers from 1 to 1000, first using Applesoft, then USR.SQR. Michael reports about a 10x speed improvement, I got somewhere north of 7x. Virtual II reported its average speed was 100%, accurately replicating the 1MHz 65C02. The good news was the answers all seemed to agree with each other.

I wrote another little program to compute x with Applesoft's SQR(n), and y with USR(n) and subtract the two, for the first 1000 integers, sum that and then take the average; and as I recall, it was something on the order of 10^-13. I did that with Virtual II running full speed, because who wants to wait for useless, trivial information? I should have printed it to a virtual printer. Anyway, close enough for me! I may play with it using a thousand random numbers, acknowledging that Applesoft's psuedo-random number generator is fatally flawed. It'll give me 1000 decimal numbers to use, versus integers, and see how that does. Granted, Applesoft converts all integers to floating point values, they'll likely be "bigger" than the first 1000 integers.

After I finish this, I'll (probably) try the same with the HP-75, the HP-71b and the TI-74. Because why not?

Anyway, no birds this morning. Went out to look for the moon and we're solidly overcast. The good news is the humidity was below 90%, even if it was still nearly 80°F. So I walked at 7, while the street lights were still on. It was fairly pleasant until the latter part of the walk. Wasn't soaked with sweat as is usually the case, but still feeling warm.

Have a nice weekend.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:23 Saturday, 2 September 2023