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I just had to search for it. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORDVAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORDVAC "Unlike the other computers of its era, the ORDVAC
by cryptnotic 12y ago
I just had to search for it.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORDVAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORDVAC
"Unlike the other computers of its era, the ORDVAC and ILLIAC I were twins and could exchange programs with each other."
"Instead of the sequence A B C D E F universally used today, the digits ten to fifteen were represented by the letters K S N J F L (King Sized Numbers Just for Laughs), corresponding to the teleprinter characters on five-track paper tape."
- acqq 12y agoThe info you quote is a description and not the answer. The whole alphabet is on the page 9-5. I still don't know why there isn't some "order" in encoding (like it is now in ASCII, that would still result in the encoding for 10 to be A and not K. and it's not a USTTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code there is K == 01111) but I'd expect they must have had some reason.
- pdw 12y agoIt looks like they took the ITA2 telegraphy code, which has the numbers in normal order but the letters in typewriter order, and re-sorted it so that the letters are alphabetical. That would explain the scrambled numbers, but not the punctuation or "K S N J F L".
- acqq 12y agoThe letter codes of ORDVAC and ILLIAC are clearly not ITA2 / USTTY. So we still don't know why they have been selected.