2 Sep
1999
2 Sep
'99
10:18 a.m.
Re:
A number of early small computers were non-binary.
One that comes
to mind is the IBM 1620 which was a decimal variable word lenght
machine. The 1620 was in production about 40 years ago and was
mainly marketed as a business machine. One of the interesting
features of this machine was that it did all its arthmetic by
table lookup.
Was that the CADET? (Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try)
The tables were stored in memory, so you could change
how the operations worked!
A colleague of mine, Fred White, tells stories about changing that table for
some scientific routines, and then restoring it at subroutine exit.
sieler(a)allegro.com