The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Glyn]

Bigtone53
Clue 1 - I've ok'd Basic already. But the big breakthrough is 86-DOS and PC-DOS. Who was it for?
Clue 2 - That is definitely too arcane in some ways for me. But Wikipedia tells us that one character is 2 'birthdays' ahead of our mystery man. (Of course W S Gilbert didn't use Office to prepare his libretto).

[Bigtone53]

OK, Frederick who had a birthday on February 29 and having signed up until his 21st 'birthday' faced being a pirate until he was 84 real years old. So leap years.

Surprised to hear that there are some things too arcane for you, if only in 'some ways'.

[Glyn]

Excellent work Bigtone53, now to find those leap babies.

[Bigtone53]

[Thinks - must ignore important fact that centuries are not leap years unless divisible by 400 - bound to be irrelevant ]

[Glyn]

It is relevant to the Excel problem. Poor old Frederick actually needed to stay until he was 88 years old. Lucky he wasn't born on Feb 30th he would never have escaped.

[Bigtone53]

A guy called Tim Paterson seems to have his fingers all over this. Also, Excel still apparently thinks that 1900 was a leap-year.

[Glyn]

Bigtone53
You are correct that Tim Paterson wrote 86-DOS that became PC-DOS. It is 365:1 that he was a leap day baby being born in '56 (A very fine year in my opinion).
However Bill's customer was IBM.

A quick recap on the mystery man. 2 birthdays behind Pirate Frederick. His tenth 'birthday' is miscalculated by Excel.

As an aside the 'feature' of Excel was introduced to maintain compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 (now owned by IBM)

Our mystery man must be spinning twice as fast in his grave, even his own people haven't put it right.

[Bigtone53]

Hollerith?

Lotus apparently don't agree that the 1900 glitch was their fault. See an alternative view here

[Glyn]

Bigtone53 Herman Hollerith, That's the bloke. Well done.

Born 29th Feb 1860. Founder of Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. (Not bad for just after his 9th birthday). A company that eventually turned in IBM, whose pivotal requirement for an OS led to the growth of Microsoft.

Ultimately it's all Pope Gregory XIII's fault. He should have had a word with the hardware manufacturer, 6 days is a bit of a rush job.

The stage is yours for another Bigtone53

[Bigtone53]

I am just off on holiday so anyone who wants to can jump in instead of me. I was going to say that my mind really isn't suited to creating these problems (let alone solving them) and that my personal preference is more mathematical but after my repeated inability to spot continued fractions, I can't even say that either

[Glyn]

Bigtone53 Thanks for persisting with it. It's far easier for the poser to connect the trivia together than for the solver to find the trivia that's connected together.

I'll try to get more maths in them, series can be a difficulty given the Sloane database unless they are warped somehow. like the Pi+Phi one.

Hope you have a good holiday.

[Bigtone53]

Thanks. While lying on the beach, I will see if I can think of something that udosuk might not solve almost before I have posted it In the meantime, please feel free.

[tarek]

Has anyone attempted solving the Italian Job conundrum?

tarek

[Smythe Dakota]

.... Excel still apparently thinks that 1900 was a leap-year.

True, but it gives correct answers for 2000 (leap year), 2100, 2200, 2300 (not leap years), 2400 (leap year), 2500, 2600, 2700 (not leap years), etc, apparently all the way to the year 9999.

(Of course, it doesn't know about years before 1900.)

Bill Smythe