>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.

I've got an Olivetti Divisumma, a motor driven mechanical calculator that
can add, subtract, multiply and divide. I have never tried a divide by 0 on
it, but I think I will go out tomorrow and give it a try (It is in a
building near 2 apple trees. Bears like apples. I can't see a bear at night,
but it can see me!). It doesn't use a repeated subtraction division method
-- I tried 99999 (I think) divided by one, and it churned out an answer in
about 10 revolutions of the motor.

It is amazing to listen to the thing run -- after all repeating sound of
calculating the result and remainder, it bangs out the result by lifting
little posts with raised backwards numbers on them, and whacking the back of
the posts with little hammers. It does this 2 times (I seem to recall), once
to print the result of the division, and the second time to print the
remainder.

- Keelan Lightfoot