🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8311@charon.cwi.nl> dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
>In article <Bz1rFw.9s1@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> >                                                     The hardware has
> > deteriorated, except for speed, for the number theorist; when Lehmer
> > wrote his criticism, virtually all computers had double-length integer
> > arithmetic.
>You asserted that before, and I asked you to name a few computers from the
>beginning of Fortran that had those capabilities.  I never saw a response.
>Can you respond now?

The IBM 704-709 series, which were the machines for which Fortran was written;
The Univac 1100 series; the CDC 1604 and 3600; and at least the great bulk of
the von Neumann type machines.  I am  not too familiar with the some of the
earlier machines, but the more-or-less standard hardware of that time had an
accumulator and a multiplier/quotient register; the actual additions were
done in the accumulator, and on multiplication the least significant part
was shifted into the MQ register, with the most significant part in the
accumulator, and on division, with the double-length dividend in the A/MQ
registers, the remainder was left in the accumulator as the quotient was
produced in the MQ register.	
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@snap.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
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