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| Authored by: Wol on Saturday, May 11 2013 @ 11:00 AM EDT |
Don't forget the computers used in the Manhattan Project, either. They were
neural computers :-)
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 11 2013 @ 08:02 PM EDT |
Not all modern digital computers have been binary. The
Soviets at the height of the cold war, around the time of
Sputnik, developed a ternary system (Setun). So numbers were
represented internally not by 0 and 1, but 0,1, and 2 or (in
this case) -1, 0, and +1.
There were good engineering reasons for this - subtraction
becomes a matter of just flipping bits, for example - but it
didn't catch on in the West. The Poles also worked with a
variant of ternary logic which allowed them to dispense with
the sign bit on binary arithmetic, and made a whole class of
machines like that.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Tolerance on Saturday, May 11 2013 @ 08:06 PM EDT |
Not all modern digital computers have been binary. The
Soviets at the height of the cold war, around the time of
Sputnik, developed a ternary system (Setun). So numbers were
represented internally not by 0 and 1, but 0,1, and 2 or (in
this case) -1, 0, and +1.
There were good engineering reasons for this - subtraction
becomes a matter of just flipping bits, for example - but it
didn't catch on in the West. The Poles also worked with a
variant of ternary logic which allowed them to dispense with
the sign bit on binary arithmetic, and made a whole class of
machines like that.
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Grumpy old man[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: JamesK on Monday, May 13 2013 @ 11:46 AM EDT |
Many years ago, I used to work on a Teleregister computer, located in the
Toronto Exchange that used something called "excess six" to store
decimal digits. The digits 0-9 were represented by hexadecimal numbers 6-F.
This was done to simplify the logic for detecting a roll over from 9 to 10. It
was easier, with the logic of the day, to set four flip flops to 6 than to
detect A (10), indicating a carry was required. Instead, the four flip flops
just incremented to 0 and that change in the most significant bit was passed on
to the next stage.
BTW, this computer was built with vacuum tubes, relays and a memory drum.
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The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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