retrocomputing ephemera

22nd November 2023: This post has been sat in my drafts folder since the start of August … I really must learn to finish what I start! While much of

In the mid 1980s I owned a rear-engined Skoda Rapid. It had a ‘go faster’ stripe on each side, which made no difference to the underlying power of the 1.3

As promised, time for a little bit of benchmarking using a common prime number algorithm. To build a little suspense, I compiled and ran my code under Free Pascal 3.04

Division The easy way to implement integer division is to use repeated subtraction. I tried this – but even on a Raspberry Pi B under Free Pascal it’s (unsurprisingly) incredibly

Addition This follows a similar process to the multiplication algorithm provided that the operands are either both positive or negative. If they’re both negative numbers then the sign of the

One of the unexpected delights of upgrading my RC2014 with the CP/M expansion has been discovering Turbo Pascal. Unexpected, because the last time I used Pascal for anything was sometime

Continuing with my foray into Turbo Pascal 3.01A on the RC2014, here’s a reasonable implementation of John Conway’s ‘Life’ algorithm. When I was a Computer Science undergraduate in the early

I recently aquired a copy of Celestial BASIC by Eric Burgess. Published in 1982, it promises to offer ‘Astronomy on your computer’. It contains 23 BASIC program listings originaly written