Your (USA members) Government at Work

[MarkHaysHarris777]

(02-03-2015 01:33 PM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  An ebay find by Don Sheperd led me to a treasure trove of documents on what the US government has been doing with HP calculators. Try a search for "HP calculator" here.

I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

hi Katie, now famous for the very flashable 'Katie clips,' (and thank you by the way, deserving of the Noble prize!--- keep up the good work) ... this is the story of computer science from the very beginning! Don't you believe for one minute 'they' wanted ENIAC to compute firing tables... there was one purpose in mind for that machine, to compute the blast wave function (well, and to compute the feasibility of critical mass in the detonator of the hydrogen bom, and the wave function from that!) This was also the primary purpose behind the design and construction of the IAS computer at Princeton, and for the MANIAC (IAS clone) at Los Alamos. Post war atomic science and the feasibility of nuclear war gave us computer science, period. If it were not for our tax dollars at work trying to figure out atomic means of killing our fellow human beings we'd all still be using Comptometers to add and subtract... which were RPN, by the way, 65 years before Jan Lukaisawicz did his work in the fifties! <but I digress>

Well, hope to meet you sometime, and thanks again for the clip(s) idea... works great!

Cheers,
marcus