The Binary Clock

 

Introduction

The Binary Clock started in 1997. I had a spare Mac 512 laying around, and I thought it would be cool if I could rig up a binary clock to run on it. The Mac 512 would be a perfect vehicle for this, since it has no hard drive and no fan - nice and quiet.

The original Binary Clock program has been tested on that very Mac 512 running System 5, and it might even run on a Mac 128 running System 1. It weighs in at about 77k for disk space, and requires 95k of RAM. It'll easily fit on an 800k floppy, along with the system. The Binary Clock is all hand-written, and compiled with MetroWerk's Code Warrior 10 (I think that's the version I used...)

The Binary Clock II program was the child of the original Binary Clock. The Binary Clock II was written using Apple's MacApp framework, and compiled under the MPW development system. It offers many advancements over the original, but at the price of size and compatibility. Included in the new version are such innovative features as:

• A resizable window
• The ability to customize the LED color
• A built-in screensaver function, for those of you who leave the Binary Clock running at work 24/7 (like I do.)
• A spiffy 3D look to the LED's

To gain these features, the Binary Clock II takes up about 800k (depending on whether you're using the 68K or PowerMac native version), and uses about 1.25 megs of RAM (those frameworks really gobble up the memory.)

How to Read the Binary Clock

In its full form, the Binary Clock displays the time and the date. The top 3 rows are the current time, and the bottom 4 are the date.

The section above shows a time of 12:30:04 PM. All times are in 24-hour format (10:00 PM would be read as 22:00). The top row is hours, the middle row is minutes, and the bottom row is seconds. The binary patterns has the most significant bit first.

For those who aren't familiar with binary counting, here's how the time above was read:

Row one is equivalent to binary 01100. Each place in a binary number is a power of 2, starting with 1 at the far right. The powers for the first row are 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. Thus, 01100 == (16 *0) + (1 * 8) + (1 * 4) + (0 * 2) + (0 * 1) = 12.
The same logic applies for the lower rows, except the powers for that one are 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.

As for the bottom 4 rows, they show the date in month, day, year, day-of-week format. Thus, this graphic is:

January 11, 2000, on the third day of the week. Note: Sunday is day 1, Saturday is day 7. There is no day 0.

Given the Y2K craziness we've had lately, I'd like to take this time to point out that the Binary Clock (both versions) are fully Y2K compatible. Actually, they are Y2047 compatible. The only problem will come in the year 2048, by which time maybe I'll have changed the layout to add a 12th bit to the year row. That'll make it Y4095 compatible. Maybe I'll expand it out to 13 bits, so it's Y8191 compatible. But I digress.

Download

Both versions of the Binary Clock are available for download. Documentation is included with each, although there isn't much to it. Feel free to drop me a line if you like it. There's no fee (who would pay for a binary clock?) Everything's compressed with StuffIt 5.x - if you need it in another form, email me and I'll email it in your choice of compression schemes.

11/21/2001 Update
I've moved the files to my current web space, so they're once again downloadable. See descriptions by each link for what they are. Documentation may or may not be in there... I can't remember what I started out with. =) Also, there aren't any PPC versions, since I'd have to round up the MacApp libraries from back then, and re-build it.

The Original Binary Clock (20k StuffIt) - This one works on the early systems (System 5 and before). I wouldn't recommend it on anything recent.

The Binary Clock Gestalt (20k StuffIt) - This one uses Gestalt calls to figure out the monitor bit depths.

The Binary Clock QD (20k StuffIt) - This one uses QuickDraw. These two versions are mostly patches for running grayscale systems.

The Binary Clock II (264k StuffIt) - The latest and greatest for pre-OS X systems. This version supports the "cool" 3D LED format, plus a built-in screen-saver function (see info above).

The Binary Clock X (256k StuffIt) - Now, native for OS X, built with delicious Cocoa technology. Enjoy the goodness of the Binary Clock with a tasty Aqua interface. Current Version: V.1.1 (1/7/2003)

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