Word: digital
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Faster Adder. National Cash Register Co. brought out a new adding machine with a "Live Keyboard" that cuts down hand motions 35%. With all the keys electrified, the machine eliminates the add bar by automatically listing each figure, can add a ten-digit number in a single operation (compared to two to eleven operations on standard machines). Price depending on the size of the keyboard...
...Audrey." Scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories have tried for years to build a machine that will "understand" human speech. First step was to transform spoken words into dancing patterns on a cathode-ray tube. Now they have built "Audrey" (for automatic digit recognition), an electronic telephone girl that recognizes ten spoken digits, 1 through 0. Hooked up to an ordinary telephone, Audrey listens to a spoken telephone number and matches its digits against sound patterns in her memory. Then she flashes numbered lights to show what she has heard. Audrey can be tuned to one man's vocal...
Each one of these dots can hold what computer men call a "bit" (short for binary digit) of information. If charged, it is considered a "one"; if uncharged, it is a "zero." By arranging ones and zeros in a code, a string of numbers, letters or words can be stored in dot form (2,500 bits is the equivalent of 69 words). When the crystal has heard its lesson once, it remembers for a week or more...
Last week sari-clad Shakuntala, now 20, gave a demonstration in Washington before a party of reporters and mathematics professors. She had become a master of the arm-long number. Without error or hesitation she extracted fourth, fifth and sixth roots of numbers up to ten digits. (Her record to date: extracting the 20th root of a 42 -digit number and multiplying figures that yielded a 39-digit result.) Without hesitation, she worked out "magic squares" (horizontal, vertical and diagonal sums are identical), starting with random numbers suggested by the audience...
Like most number prodigies, Shakuntala does not know how she does it. She thinks about the problem and the numbers come - in three or four seconds. Often she gives the answer as soon as her questioner has written down the last digit. In the case of the root problems, the answer must be a whole number. Her mysterious talent does not yield uneven answers. She has studied logarithms, but they confused her and she does not use them...