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Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

I remember as a teen when my parents got me a pc (they could Ill afford) as an upgrade from the, by then 10 years old, hand-me-down ZX Spectrum.

I was in awe at how many primes I could find on my cyrix 333Mhz on my own noddy code

Left it running all day when at school.

Never found any thing of value but I learned how to Beowulf cluster and learned a lot about arbitrary integer implementation

Simpler times

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When I was a sophomore in high school, in 1972, our school started a "computer class" which was comprised of a teletype in a corner of a former storage room. Me and my best friend were the only ones to sign up for it. The teacher was the math teacher and he had a manual from the local community college he tossed to us and basically turned us loose on it. We logged into their Univac. The first thing we did was find the square root of a number using the Newtonian approximation. The second thing we did is find the 1st 100 primes which took forever :)

Awesome your parents got you a PC, we would have died for one if it existed then!

For me it was learning Fortran IV (after Focal then Basic - PDP-8i) because my dad let me use his account on the uni CDC 6400 - basically built basic bigint math library that I then put to use to determine if 1000! + 1 was prime :-)

And?It was prime?

From memory, "I don't recall" - it was 50yrs ago :-) Though wolfram alpha tells me "nope,it ain't"

Though I do have some recollection of hitting account limits on compute time on the CDC machine. My dad never mentioned any overages though. He was working in CDC assembler building a simulator for something with the odd name (at the time) of a "microcontroller". It was a profs project that needed an emulator so that was his term project.

Two minutes with libgmp (most of that time trying to remember the function names) tells me that 1000!+1 is divisible by 6563

Hah! Reminds me of myself as a youth, but I was trying to find people primes with an utterly horrible Perl script. I wish I still hade my early code from my salad days.

Is finding primes of all things really the first thing you did with a computer as a teen? You could have invented Facebook or Napster

I invented Napster but then Justin Timberlake stole my idea.

I know.

I'm fairly sure i did develop them but just deleted as i thought nobody would want that

In fact, nobody does want Facebook, so you were right

I actually built in the 90s a site that was kinda like reddit but just for BBC news articles (they only started comments a few years ago) and a comedy/satire news site ala the onion.

in retrospect teenage me should prob have told other people about my websites

The first thing I'd do today is a spam filter :-)

Finding primes is a hugely important problem. I’d argue much more important for the world than sharing what you ate for breakfast or music.

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