Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!att!cbnewsh!beyer From: beyer@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (jean-david.beyer) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: hardware complex arithmetic support Summary: Complex number computers. Message-ID: <3082@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> Date: 15 Aug 89 12:07:21 GMT References: Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 20 In article , jk3k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Joe Keane) writes: > Here's a possibly stupid question, but i've never seen anything about this. I do not believe that there are NOW any machines that have complex number operations in the hardware. At Bell Labs, either just before, during, or slightly after World War II they built a series of computers, using electro- mechanical relays as the logical elements. These machines were known as the Model I, II, ... VI. I think they built 2 of one of them. Since they were interested in calculating electric wave filters, and such things, they had to do a lot of complex number operations. At least one of these machines supported complex arithmetic directly. I do not suppose these machines exist any more. They were probably faster than the desk calculators (also mechanical) of the day, but were nowhere near as fast as the vacuum tube machines that replaced them. -- Jean-David Beyer AT&T Bell Laboratories Holmdel, New Jersey, 07733 attunix!beyer