From owner-pc532%daver@mips.com Tue Apr 17 10:00:20 1990
Reply-To: pc532@daver.bungi.com
To: pc532%daver@pyramid
Subject: looking for something to do on your pc532?
Date: 17 Apr 90 14:44:10 MSZ (Tue)
From: jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)

Hey sports fans,

So you've got your pc532 together, talking serial to some other machine,
and now you're sitting around waiting for someone to port unix. There it sits.
Whirring away in a nice, fast, pipelined endless loop polling the serial
port. What do you do? Why, you calculate pi to 9000 decimal places, that's
what you do!

Here's the btoa'd executable for a stand-alone pi calculator.
The text expects to go at 0x4000 and the data at 0x5000. You can use Bruce's
extractt and extractd utilities to yank out the segments and download them
(using his download program, of course). It will interactively ask you
how many digits to calculate, spit out some information about how much
space it's all going to take, and then let you know the progress of the
calculation every 100 terms (finally spitting out the value of pi to the
requested number of decimal places).

I haven't got the figures in front of me (forgot to write them down, damn)
but I think this should take about 24 seconds to calculate pi to 5000
places. This seems a little slow, since my 68020 (at 25Mhz) will do it
in just 29 seconds and it's also running Unix (though with only one user).
Perhaps I'm doing something wildly wrong, but you be the judge..

Anyway.. I used btoa (the new one, version 5.2) since it produces images
that are about 35% smaller and I don't know how many people are on this
list now. Let me know if you absolutely need a uuencoded copy and I'll send
it to you directly.

Not that this actually does anything that useful.

Thanks to Waldemar Kebsch for the original algorithm and Bruce for the
stand-alone i/o routines.

					Jordan

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