At 20:43 26/09/99 -0600, you wrote:
>Keelan Lightfoot wrote:
>>
>> I want something big, something that hurts me if I drop it on my foot,
something
>> that reads a medium that I can manually edit, something that flashes lights
>> and lets me know it is working!  I can't do anything stupid like divide
by 0
>> without the OS going crazy
>
>What you REALLY need is a vintage Friden square root calculator. They
>were electromechanical devices that were widely used for serious number
>crunching at the dawn of digital computer. You could set one of those up
>to divide by zero, and it would churn away for hours, merrily looking
>for a solution in its cogs and gears. I was working for the NYS
>Education Dept. summers when going to school, and this was a great way
>to convince my boss I was busy while I read dirty books and so forth.
>
>
>--
>Bear Technology  Making Montana safe for Grizzlies
>
>http://people.montana.com/~bowman/
>
>


Even older you could call it an ADDER, forget whom made this but I have one
in my museum somewhere, and this this was fully MANUAL! you have to push
very big buttons, then pull a few leavers (Levars of you US types), and
then the value would appear. But I think that Keenlan is looking to find
something that appitimises electronics and the momentus occasion that he is
attempting to recreate, something like:-

PENTODE
Problimatic
        Evolutional
                Numberical
                        Tabulating
                                Output
                                        Descriptive
                                                Engine


OK, so you do better
Dennis