Handtops, UMPC - Progress

I was first introduced to the joys of programming a home computer in 1978/79 (not quite sure) while I was still at university. A friend of mine imported one of the original Apple computers. It was a large ugly grey box with no drives, an 8 bit processor, and 64 k of RAM. It also had a built in BASIC chip. For those of you who can’t remember that far back, one loaded and stored programs from a cassette tape recorder, and the monitor was a black and white TV screen.

My friend was overjoyed with this new piece of equipment, and proceeded to play space invaders or some such game on it. This kept him busy for a while, but the question soon came up, what are we going to use it for?

I suggested, having just read an article about a mathematician who had calculated the number of prime numbers between 1 and 1000000 in record time using only pen and paper, that we should see if we could write a program to do the same. The idea was to calculate and store all the prime numbers between 1 and 1000000, store the start time and the end time, and see how much faster we could do it on a computer. The time we were aiming to beat was about two weeks, I am not absolutely sure any more.

We spent an interesting afternoon writing this program, including saving the results to tape as we were concerned that there was not enough RAM on the machine to save to memory. We then set the program going, and went out for the evening.

The following day the machine was still grinding away, and 27 plus hours after we started the process of, we were finally rewarded with a list of prime numbers.

I was very impressed with this at the time, and this little experiment was probably one of the reasons why I eventually became involved with computers. I also kept the paper readout (from an IBM Golf Ball Typewriter) of the program code.

Several years later, when I bought my first IBM PC, I re-created the program, and ran it to see how long it took. I can’t remember the figure, but it was minutes rather than hours.

When I started programming in Pascal, I re-wrote the program in Pascal, and then again in Delphi . I still have the Delphi version.

On receiving the OQO, one of the first things that I did after loading the machine was to dig up this little piece of programming history and run it on the OQO. 7 seconds was all that it took.

When I look back over the last 30 years, and see the progress that we have made with computers, it still amazes me. It also puts into perspective the genius of the people who conceived and built these machines. Thanks to you all, and I am looking forward to the next 30 years!