Assignment 1, due Aug 27

Part of the homework for 22C:60, Fall 2010
by Douglas W. Jones
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science

Always, on every assignment, please write your name legibly as it appears on your University ID and on the class list! All assignments will be due at the start of class on the day indicated (usually a Friday). The only exceptions to this rule will be by advance arrangement unless there is what insurance companies call "an act of God" - something outside your control. Homework must be turned in on paper and in class! Late work may be turned in to the teaching assistant's mailbox, but see the late work policy. Never push late work under someone's door!


-- http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/assem/notes/

  1. What is your E-mail address? (If you have more than one, give the address you'd prefer used for class purposes.)

    Real Homework!

  2. Background: The most interesting character set supported by any printing device in the 1950's was that of the Fridden Flex-O-Writer. One version of this had 86 printable characters and 8 control codes.

    Question: The Flex-O-Writer did not have an obvious "best" size for characters. Briefly suggest how you could support this character set on a computer with a 6-bit character code. Both the Illiac code and Unicode's UTF-8 encoding offer hints about how this could be done. (1 point)

    Warning: There is, if you search hard enough, documentation on the real Flex-O-Writer on the Internet. The actual character code of the Flex-O-Writer was bizarre enough that it is unlikely to help you answer this question, but it might be fun to look at after you think you have a decent answer.

  3. Show what "COMP. ORG., FALL 2010" would look like as a punched paper tape in the ILLIAC I character encoding. Don't include the quotes. (1 point)

    Suggestion: Your answers to this problem and the next can be arranged as parallel vertical columns, although because of differences in coding, the columns will not be the same length, even though they encode the same characters.

  4. Give the 7-bit ASCII representation of the text "COMP. ORG., FALL 2010" Don't include the quotes. Give your result as a column of binary numbers. (1 point)