4 Aug
2014
4 Aug
'14
5:48 p.m.
I wrote:
> For those interested in early electronic
calculator architecture,
the
> reading in the Maintenance & Service manual
is really interesting.
To which Tony D. responded:
Yes... I found it interesting that this machine uses n
pulses to
represet a digit
n, not a binary encoding. And that there is no full
adder in the
machine, just
counters.
The Friden 130/132 did the same kind of thing. The machine had no ALU
to speak of. Just a set of four counters that would be connected
together (and counting up or down) in differing ways depending on the
operation being performed. Everything was done by counting up sums
digit at a time, by counting pulses coming out of the delay line.
The Friden 130/132 logic was significantly more elegant (and much less
complex electronically) than the Wyle Scientific, despite the fact that
the Scientific had larger numeric capacity, and three memory registers
versus the single storage register of the Friden 130/132. The 130/132,
though, benefited dramatically from the fact that it was a
stack-oriented machine, which made it a lot less complicated to use
(once you got used to it). Keeping track of the register usage on the
Wyle Scientific can be a bit of a chore.
-Rick