Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "CORDIC" in English language version.
So far CORDIC has been known to be implemented only in binary form. But, as will be demonstrated here, the algorithm can be easily modified for a decimal system.* […] *In the meantime it has been learned that Hewlett-Packard and other calculator manufacturers employ the decimal CORDIC techniques in their scientific calculators.
John E. Meggitt B.A., 1953; PhD, 1958, Cambridge University. Awarded the First Smith Prize at Cambridge in 1955 and elected a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. […] Joined IBM British Laboratory at Hursley, Winchester in 1958. Interests include error-correcting codes and small microprogrammed computers.([3], [4])
John E. Meggitt B.A., 1953; PhD, 1958, Cambridge University. Awarded the First Smith Prize at Cambridge in 1955 and elected a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. […] Joined IBM British Laboratory at Hursley, Winchester in 1958. Interests include error-correcting codes and small microprogrammed computers.([3], [4])
I even flew down to Southern California to talk with Jack Volder who had implemented the transcendental functions in the Athena machine and talked to him for about an hour. He referred me to the original papers by Meggitt where he'd gotten the pseudo division, pseudo multiplication generalized functions. […] I did quite a bit of literary research leading to some very interesting discoveries. […] I found a treatise from 1624 by Henry Briggs discussing the calculation of common logarithms, interestingly used the same pseudo-division/pseudo-multiplication method that MacMillan and Volder used in Athena. […] We had purchased a LOCI-2 from Wang Labs and recognized that Wang Labs LOCI II used the same algorithm to do square root as well as log and exponential. After the introduction of the 9100 our legal department got a letter from Wang saying that we had infringed on their patent. And I just sent a note back with the Briggs reference in Latin and it said, "It looks like prior art to me." We never heard another word.([5])
During the development of the desktop HP 9100 calculator I was responsible for developing the algorithms to fit the architecture suggested by Tom Osborne. Although the suggested methodology for the algorithms came from Malcolm McMillan I did considerable amount of reading to understand the core calculations […] Although Wang Laboratories had used similar methods of calculation, my study found prior art dated 1624 that read on their patents. […] This research enabled the adaption of the transcendental functions through the use of the algorithms to match the needs of the customer within the constraints of the hardware. This proved invaluable during the development of the HP-35, […] Power series, polynomial expansions, continued fractions, and Chebyshev polynomials were all considered for the transcendental functions. All were too slow because of the number of multiplications and divisions required. The generalized algorithm that best suited the requirements of speed and programming efficiency for the HP-35 was an iterative pseudo-division and pseudo-multiplication method first described in 1624 by Henry Briggs in 'Arithmetica Logarithmica' and later by Volder and Meggitt. This is the same type of algorithm that was used in previous HP desktop calculators. […] The complexity of the algorithms made multilevel programming a necessity. This meant the calculator had to have subroutine capability, […] To generate a transcendental function such as Arc-Hyperbolic-Tan required several levels of subroutines. […] Chris Clare later documented this as Algorithmic State Machine (ASM) methodology. Even the simple Sine or Cosine used the Tangent routine, and then calculated the Sine from trigonometric identities. These arduous manipulations were necessary to minimize the number of unique programs and program steps […] The arithmetic instruction set was designed specifically for a decimal transcendental-function calculator. The basic arithmetic operations are performed by a 10's complement adder-subtractor which has data paths to three of the registers that are used as working storage.
John E. Meggitt B.A., 1953; PhD, 1958, Cambridge University. Awarded the First Smith Prize at Cambridge in 1955 and elected a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. […] Joined IBM British Laboratory at Hursley, Winchester in 1958. Interests include error-correcting codes and small microprogrammed computers.([3], [4])
The ROM contains 16 arctangent values, the arctans of 2−n. It also contains 14 log values, the base-2 logs of (1+2−n). These may seem like unusual values, but they are used in an efficient algorithm called CORDIC, which was invented in 1958.
John E. Meggitt B.A., 1953; PhD, 1958, Cambridge University. Awarded the First Smith Prize at Cambridge in 1955 and elected a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. […] Joined IBM British Laboratory at Hursley, Winchester in 1958. Interests include error-correcting codes and small microprogrammed computers.([3], [4])
