-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> writes:
At 9:16 AM -0800 10/31/96, Hal Finney wrote: <snip> Sliderules were just becoming common when I was in high school....
Seriously, only a very few of us had and used sliderules...mine was a big synthetic K & E (Keuffel and Esser, as I recall). The raging "DOS vs. Mac" or "RISC vs. CISC" debate of that age was "aluminum" (the yellow Dietzgens) vs. the old standby, "bamboo." Plus some oddball circular sliderules.
Those of us who used sliderules were sometimes characterized as "nerds"...perhaps this is why I today have such a strong reation to so many young programmers and engineers voluntarily calling themselves "nerds" and "geeks." (The deconstructive, postmodern theory is presumably that they are "reclaiming" the term, as with dykes and niggers reclaiming those hateful terms. I still reject this as crap.)
What's there to reject in "Yeah, I'm happy with what I want, so fuck you?" (Which is essentially what this reclaming stuff is). Of course, I see nothing wrong with rejecting postmodernist intellectuals :-) but they have stolen some good ideas. <comments re: tables snipped>
(Precomputation of values, aka "tabling," is of course still a modern topic. Some of the newer names come out of AI, compiler research, etc. For example, speculative execution. Not exactly a book of precomputed logs, but similar.)
Let's not forget memoizing, either. Kinda space ineficient, but with a decent virtual memory system you can cache perviously-used solutions and go real fast. Hmmm, like, say you were for some reason trying to factor a multitude of large composites. Precomputing everything would probably be rather inefficient, but once you've factords something, why throw it away? (I knew there would be some crypto relevance in here :-) Jer "standing on top of the world/ never knew how you never could/ never knew why you never could live/ innocent life that everyone did" -Wormhole -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBMnpjBckz/YzIV3P5AQEpWgMAl8PkPlrY/s84JGnuoiX7gPXMfjQlo+fZ tBxJVg6FP9EVB5ASL2FDk3s8butKC6FP7SpJZOSzmUSExawzFpuHW1IZc5efxhBR Cyzjj1ybUhEUGPHlBhrqbTXU5EzI5iB5 =m5oK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----