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   Michael Ossmann (mossmann@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 22-Aug-2026 14:01:26 JST Michael Ossmann

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   • William D. Jones

   @cr1901 You might enjoy the 1988 book, A Commonsense Approach to the Theory of Error Correcting Codes by Benjamin Arazi

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     William D. Jones (cr1901@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 22-Aug-2026 14:01:27 JST William D. Jones

     #lazyweb #retrocomputing Okay I'll bite. Before I start emailing around, anyone know the prior art to BCH decoders/encoders in hardware, especially Reed Solomon? Especially in the 80s.

     I know of using LUTs to speed up finite field multiplies (and Zech's logarithm, to speed up basically everything). But unclear to me if those tricks were used in hardware back in the day.

     Context is: Looking at Reed-Solomon/CIRC, and thinking to myself "this feels like it was unimplementable in real time in 80s"

     Steve's Place repeated this.