Price/Performance of time

[Jerry Feldman]

On 10/01/2008 01:52 PM, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 11:21 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
>   
>> With the exception of Connecticut,  each POS had only 4K of memory ...
>>     
>
>   Okay, since it has to be asked: What was different about Connecticut?  :)
>
>   
Taxes. Connecticut charged both sals tax and meals tax depending on the 
item, so we had to use 2 different sets of tax tables, which certainly 
would not fit in 4K. The system was written totally in PDP-8 assembler 
and the code was very tight. That also meant that we got another 
register in the CPU. The PDP-8 had optional bank registers for 
instructions and addresses. If I recall, they were 3 bits each. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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