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This month I want to talk about quite a few things, give you some facts, some opinions and hopefully an interesting column.  To start off there were three articles on CHAOS CORNER
                           By Aaron Hamlett 
 
This month I want to talk about quite a few things, give you some facts, some opinions and hopefully an interesting column.  To start off there were three articles on the ADAM in this month's "COMPUTER SHOPPER" which was two more than any other "classic computer".  However the news was fairly routine and you can get much of the same here in your very own St. Louis Newsletter.  (Unashamed plug) 
 
If you have ever written a BASIC program that was very large, around 24 blocks long, you may have tried running the program only to get an "Out of memory error".  You might use the FRE(0) command to find out how much memory you have left and discover that you have a few hundred bytes.  How can it be out of memory if you have hundreds of bytes?  Besides the space required to store the actual program, memory is needed when a variable is given a value.  Real variables or "floating point variables" take ten bytes to store a number.  If you just name a variable with letters it is classed as a real variable, even if the number actually assigned to the variable is an integer.  If an integer is all that is needed and no division is used then use an integer variable.  The percent sign (%) is used to declare an integer variable.  An integer variable uses only five bytes of memory.  The last variable type is the string variable and it is denoted with a dollar sign ($).  These variables use at least five bytes and usually more since it requires one byte for each character in the string.  One key item with variables, the variables K, K%, K$ are all different variables, whereas the variables KAT, KAY, and KANDY are really all the same variable since SmartBASIC only uses the first two letters of a variable name to keep track of it.
 
If you have ever heard Grace Hopper, an early computer pioneer and officer in the U.S Navy, talk about computers you have probably been introduced to her nanosecond, and microsecond.  Like most people, she had a hard time understanding such small units of time.  Even experienced computer users who toss around these terms may not really understand how small these numbers are really.  She pestered the engineers until they presented her with some concrete examples.  What the engineers did was to calculate how far light traveled in a milli, micro and nanosecond.  A millisecond is one thousandth of a second and in one millisecond a beam of light in space will travel 187 miles.  A microsecond is one millionth of a second and a beam of light in space will travel 990 feet in that lenght of time.  A nanosecond is one billionth of a second and this speedy beam of light will travel 12 inches every nanosecond.  The engineers that Grace Hopper was working with cut some wire to illustrate the nanosecond and microsecond.  The cost of 187 miles of wire was deemed to high just to be used as a demonstration for the millisecond, besides it would be very heavy.  What does this have to do with the ADAM?  Well, just think of that 990 feet of wire whenever you write a program and waste a microsecond.  ly understand how small these numbers are really.  She pestered the engineer
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