Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
One of my favorite examples of this is Robert Heinlein's Starman Jones, in which all the spaceship navigation is done with manual readings, then they are entered into a computer after looking up the the decimal to binary values in a book, and when the computer is finished calculating, they convert it back to decimal by looking up the binary to decimal values! I believe that was already obsolete by the time Heinlein wrote it.
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I seem to remember thinking that looking up decimal to binary in a book and entering the binary numbers into the computer then converting the computer's light display back to decimal was a bit silly. But then in 1952-3 when the book was written, it would be quite possible the computer would not have had enough memory to store the lookup tables. Grasping at straws here...