Friden (was: IBM 604

I actually dusted the thing off and tried it out for probably the first time in 5 years. After figuring out how to get going (there are still 5+ knobs that I still don't know the function of) and cranking out some more ozone, here's the resullts. Oh, its about 11" cubed and 40~50 lbs dense. Needs more space for its carriage to move around. One place division seems to take about 0.8 seconds and there are ten places, so it may be possible that No division will take more than 8~9 seconds, with a properly tuned machine. If you want, you can set the division place "pointer" just one digit to the left irregardless of the numbers involved and it will "count up". THIS takes much longer (EG 1 minute for a result of 400) since it has to count all the way up the hill instead of counting up each "step" and then stepping to the next digit. (example 345 is 29X that of 3+4+5 in terms of time involved). I could guess that if someone didn't want to beat his machine up quite so much he might use the slow method. Mine in its semi-maintained state will only give 100% correct answers with the slow method. Ouch. My hunch is that duoquinary or whatever was set up to make computer math more palateable for non mathematicians (first C.S. degree = 1966? @UNC) and therefore more customers. I would be not at all surprised if the implementation was just 6 bits per digit (1,2,3,4,5,shift), it is only 80% added waste over pure binary and required less effort for people to work with. IBM was probably worried that its users were base 10 bigots and base 8 wouldn't be as popular. Hunch. I had some conversations with a 6xx user at G.E.20 years ago in case anyone wonders why the interest. John A.