RW 530 Floating Point

I was taking a digital design class from the same professor who ran the lab and "owned" the Ramo-Wooldridge 530. I chose implementing floating point arithmetic as a class project. I wrote this in assembly language, tested it on the 530, and then turned in a twenty page listing for the class.

I can't remember clearly how assembly worked other than I used the CDC 6000 Compass assembler in some opportunistic way to produce absolute binary that could be transformed into my RW 530 Debug Monitor's load format.

I remember working through binary division finding to my surprise that one could work from lsb or msb and that both approaches were well discussed in the literature. I hated long division in 6th grade. Now, in binary, with a correspondingly small multiplication table, I found the work fun.

I had a friend who worked as a teaching assistant for the professor. He recounted the conversation they had had trying to evaluate the class project I had submitted, a twenty page listing. In the end they chose to trust me that it worked. I had no motivation to deceive them.