Also Pete Hand from LV designed a better FLW clock. I have his original I bought from his family/friends after he passed on... RIP brother nixie neon lover! You can see Michael's much "enhanced" version on badnixie: http://www.badnixie.com/Acrylic_Nixie.html
I love this clock and it still works great today. Bill On Saturday, May 29, 2021 at 6:08:54 AM UTC-7 Tom Van Baak wrote: > Ray Weisling went to extraordinary lengths to fit his code and all the > words into very limited memory. Today, because memory is plentiful and > cheap, one would simply create a large table of all FLW, each word using > 4 bytes. It would be so simple. > > But instead he resorted to bit tricks. For example he created an > alphabet consisting of only 16 letters (not 26). That way a single > letter would use not 8, or 5, but just 4 bits. Thus any 4 letter word > that was a member of that alphabet required only 16 bits to encode, a 2x > memory saving. Very clever. > > By creating several different sets of 16-letter alphabets he was able to > generate almost all the words you see. The remaining few exceptions were > done with a 4 byte table. To me it looked like a massive amount of > manual work, almost like a puzzle, but that's what you did as an > embedded programmer in the 90's when literally every byte counted. > > I've seen the source code. It might be on the web, I don't know. Ray hit > hard times (again) in 2013; we exchanged a lot of Nixie email that year; > he sold me his personal FLW and GEEK clock to cover bills. He died not > that long after. His clocks, of course, live on and work perfectly. > > /tvb > www.LeapSecond.com > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/b28347db-fa0a-45b0-b975-93ab69f591een%40googlegroups.com.
