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Old 8th May 2020, 8:21 am   #14
TonyDuell
Dekatron
 
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Biggin Hill, London, UK.
Posts: 5,188
Default Re: Wireless World calculator project

Sure, but the Digi-Cal was hardly the first electronic calculator. There had been computers around for about 20 years by the time that project was published and I would have thought that the differences between what was easy/sensible mechancally .vs. electronically would be well known and understood by then.

Incidentally, I've always found the distiction between 'augend' and 'addend' to be curious. Subtraction and division are not commutative, so it makes sense to have different names for the 2 inputs. Multiplication is commutative (at least for real numbers and complex numbers) but for actually doing it it can make sense to, say, take the number with the smaller number of digits as the multiplier. But I can't think of an adder (mechanical or electronic) or indeed a way of adding by hand which is not symmetical on the 2 inputs.
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