Calculating e

[Cappellanus]

I'm very intrigued on your calculation of e. Do you plan on sharing the program with us? I suppose you just need a division routine and an addition routine, but how exactly you do this isn't clear to me.

So you have to divide the "term" which starts at 1, by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on up to 78, which I guess are all holdable in a single byte. So after some allowance for decimal point, you just have to divide a 47-digit value by a single-digit (if you think of this as base-256 numbers), and keep track of where the decimal point is, and then add the result into the "sum". For the division, if you just shift a single-bit, and get a single-bit of the result, and only have to subtract 1 or 2 bytes out of the term, that wouldn't be too bad. But wouldn't that destroy the term, so you need another 47 bytes to keep track of intermediate results? I'm getting confused.

I may try writing the algorithm in "C" and suppose I could then check the term after each iteration, as well as the sum, and try to figure out where the error is.

I've always wanted to find a good "Pi" generator. I don't think there's a fast-converging taylor series for that, and I doubt there are similar simple algorithms. I think most quickly converging (high-digit producers) are more complex than I could program in assembly, especially if I have to toggle it in a byte at a time.

I'd love to see the code.

Oh, and Grant: No, had a work emergency, so I didn't get much construction done on my Kenbak-1. I was very excited to hear about "no-clean" solder. I'd never heard of this before. I always hated rosin residue, almost as much as I hated trying to clean it off without getting IC sockets coated with a thin layer. I googled it, I read up a bit, and was surprised to see radio-shack has some for very cheap. Got some, can't wait to try it!!!