Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-3 Owner's Manual page 44

shows the number of 10's, the third the number of 10's, and the fourth the number of 1000's. These are simply increasing powers
of 10.
Scientific notation breaks down a decimal number into two parts: one shows what the numbers are; the second shows how far a
number is to the left or right of the decimal point. For example:
1234 becomes 1.234 times 10
3
(3 places to the right)
654321 becomes 6.54321 times 10
5
(5 places to the right)
.000125 becomes 1.25 times 10-
4
(4 places to the left)
Scientific notation is useful for many shortcuts. You can see that it would take a lot of writing to show 1.0 times 10
87
-
a 1 and
87 zeros! But, in scientific notation this number looks like this:
or
1.0 IE 87
The PC-3 uses scientific notation whenever numbers become too large to display using decimal notation. This computer uses a
special exponentiation symbol, the IE, to mean "times ten to the":
1234567890000 is displayed as 1.23456789 IE 12
.000000000001 is displayed as 1. IE -12
Those of you who are unfamiliar with this type of notation should take some time to put in a few very large and very small
numbers to note how they are displayed.
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