- May 11, 2008
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Back in the early 90s, I used a small program on my Amiga A1200 to calculate the value of pi to one million decimal places. It took a while - maybe several minutes - I'm not sure now. Not surprising as the computer was of 1993 vintage running at 14 MHz with 2 MB (not GB) of EDO RAM including the onboard graphics.
Years later, I did the same thing with a Windows 98 PC. If I remember correctly, it was over in a flash.
Something prompted me to try it again today and I downloaded the first utility I found - a tiny standalone program called picalc. It does 10 thousand digits in a few seconds, starts to struggle a bit with 50 thousand and takes forever to reach a million digits. In fact, I stopped it when it still hadn't finished after 10 minutes or so.
Is this because the program is poorly coded? Can you recommend a better tool? If you want to know why I need such a program, the answer is that I don't, not really. I just want to play with it.
Years later, I did the same thing with a Windows 98 PC. If I remember correctly, it was over in a flash.
Something prompted me to try it again today and I downloaded the first utility I found - a tiny standalone program called picalc. It does 10 thousand digits in a few seconds, starts to struggle a bit with 50 thousand and takes forever to reach a million digits. In fact, I stopped it when it still hadn't finished after 10 minutes or so.
Is this because the program is poorly coded? Can you recommend a better tool? If you want to know why I need such a program, the answer is that I don't, not really. I just want to play with it.
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