Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Reverse Polish notation" in English language version.
[…] In their advertisements and also in a letter to me, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), the best known manufacturer of RPN calculators, says that RPN is based on a suggestion by Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956), and that RPN was invented and is patented by HP. Aside from the apparent contradiction in these two statements, I do not think that either of them is quite true. My first experience with RPN involved a nice old Friden EC-130 desktop electronic calculator, circa 1964. The EC-130 has RPN with a push-down stack of four registers, all visible simultaneously on a cathode ray tube display. Furthermore, they are shown upside down, that is, the last-in-first-out register is at the bottom. […] Around 1966, the Monroe Epic calculator offered RPN with a stack of four, a printer, and either 14 or 42 step programmability. The instruction booklets with these two calculators make no mention of RPN or Jan Łukasiewicz. […]
In terms of practical choice between calculators, it would appear that RPN is faster and more accurate overall but particularly for more complex problems.(5 pages)
Dazu stehen die beiden Register R1 und R2 als Kurzspeicher für die Operanden der arithmetischen Operationen zur Verfügung. Gerechnet wird in der umgekehrten polnischen Notation, wie z.B. beim Taschenrechner HP 45 (1972) oder HP11 (1998).(5 pages)
Zum Eingeben der Zahlen stand eine Tastatur bereit (Dezimalzahlen, Gleitkommadarstellung). Anweisungen gaben Nutzer in umgekehrter polnischer Notation: zuerst die Argumente, um Register zu befüllen, dann der auszuführende Operator.
Über die I/O-Einheit kann man die Z3 als reine Rechenmaschine einsetzen, Operationen nimmt sie dann in der praktischen – wenn auch gewöhnungsbedürftigen – umgekehrten polnischen Notation entgegen. Werte im Speicher ablegen (oder von dort laden) kann man so allerdings nicht.
[…] I changed the architecture to use RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), which is the ideal notation for programming environment in which coding efficiency is critical. In the beginning, that change was not well received... […]
The interesting aspect of the programming of the Z-3 was that this code was very similar to that of, say, an HP-25. To perform an operation on two numbers, commands would first be given to recall the numbers from appropriate locations in the memory, followed by the command for the operation. Numbers were automatically positioned in registers in the Arithmetic Unit of the machine so that operations like division and subtraction would proceed in the right order. Results were left in a register in the AU so that long sequences of operations could be carried out. Thus, the Z-3 used a version of RPN that was nearly identical to that used by HP! I have obtained copies of early programs that Zuse had written for the evaluation of a 5 × 5 determinant, and it is possible to run these programs on an HP-41C with almost no modification whatsoever (once the numbers have been placed in the storage registers beforehand). The AU of the Z-3 contained 3 registers, although Zuse never referred to them as a stack, of course. These registers were labelled "f", "a", and "b". All entrance and exit to and from the AU was through the "f" register. This is sort of like the display register of the 41C, which is distinct from the stack. Arithmetic operations were performed on numbers in the a and b registers, so these may be thought of as corresponding to the x and y registers of HP's. Unlike modern computer practice, the actual numbers themselves were moved around the registers, not just a pointer.
In terms of practical choice between calculators, it would appear that RPN is faster and more accurate overall but particularly for more complex problems.(5 pages)
The computer can be used as a simple hand-held calculator. In this mode besides entering the numeric values the user must enter the instructions and the addresses by pressing their keys. He has to enter the numbers and operators in the reverse Polish notation.
[…] Bob holds over 80 patents awarded during his work as Director of RD for Friden, and Singer and as Senior Project Engineer at Xerox. He retired from Xerox RD in 1990. He is responsible for the development of the first commercial electronic calculator, the Friden 130, which has been displayed at the Smithsonian. […]
[…] Hamblin soon became aware of the problems of (a) computing mathematical formulae containing brackets, and (b) the memory overhead in having dealing with memory stores each of which had its own name. One solution to the first problem was Jan Łukasiewicz's Polish notation, which enables a writer of mathematical notation to instruct a reader the order in which to execute the operations (e.g. addition, multiplication, etc) without using brackets. Polish notation achieves this by having an operator (+, ×, etc) precede the operands to which it applies, e.g., +ab, instead of the usual, a+b. Hamblin, with his training in formal logic, knew of Lukasiewicz's work. […]
[…] In their advertisements and also in a letter to me, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), the best known manufacturer of RPN calculators, says that RPN is based on a suggestion by Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956), and that RPN was invented and is patented by HP. Aside from the apparent contradiction in these two statements, I do not think that either of them is quite true. My first experience with RPN involved a nice old Friden EC-130 desktop electronic calculator, circa 1964. The EC-130 has RPN with a push-down stack of four registers, all visible simultaneously on a cathode ray tube display. Furthermore, they are shown upside down, that is, the last-in-first-out register is at the bottom. […] Around 1966, the Monroe Epic calculator offered RPN with a stack of four, a printer, and either 14 or 42 step programmability. The instruction booklets with these two calculators make no mention of RPN or Jan Łukasiewicz. […]
[…] The KDF9 is remarkable because it is the believed to be the first zero-address instruction format computer to have been announced (in 1960). It was first delivered at about the same time (early 1963) as the other famous zero-address computer, the Burroughs B5000 in America. Like many modern pocket calculators, a zero-address machine allows the use of Reverse Polish arithmetic; this offers certain advantages to compiler writers. It is believed that the attention of the English Electric team was first drawn to the zero-address concept through contact with George (General Order Generator), an autocode programming system written for a Deuce computer by the University of Sydney, Australia, in the latter half of the 1950s. George used Reversed Polish, and the KDF9 team were attracted to this convention for the pragmatic reason of wishing to enhance performance by minimising accesses to main store. This may be contrasted with the more "theoretical" line taken independently by Burroughs. Besides a hardware nesting store or stack - the basic mechanism of a zero-address computer - the KDF9 had other groups of central registers for improving performance which gave it an interesting internal structure. […][2] (NB. This is an edited version of a talk given to North West Group of the Society at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK on 1996-10-01.)
In terms of practical choice between calculators, it would appear that RPN is faster and more accurate overall but particularly for more complex problems.(5 pages)
Die Z3 konnte in zwei Betriebsmodi betrieben werden, und zwar in dem Programm- und Dialogmodus. Das Rechnen im Dialog erfolgt wie mit einem Taschenrechner in der umgekehrten polnischen Notation.[1]
The interesting aspect of the programming of the Z-3 was that this code was very similar to that of, say, an HP-25. To perform an operation on two numbers, commands would first be given to recall the numbers from appropriate locations in the memory, followed by the command for the operation. Numbers were automatically positioned in registers in the Arithmetic Unit of the machine so that operations like division and subtraction would proceed in the right order. Results were left in a register in the AU so that long sequences of operations could be carried out. Thus, the Z-3 used a version of RPN that was nearly identical to that used by HP! I have obtained copies of early programs that Zuse had written for the evaluation of a 5 × 5 determinant, and it is possible to run these programs on an HP-41C with almost no modification whatsoever (once the numbers have been placed in the storage registers beforehand). The AU of the Z-3 contained 3 registers, although Zuse never referred to them as a stack, of course. These registers were labelled "f", "a", and "b". All entrance and exit to and from the AU was through the "f" register. This is sort of like the display register of the 41C, which is distinct from the stack. Arithmetic operations were performed on numbers in the a and b registers, so these may be thought of as corresponding to the x and y registers of HP's. Unlike modern computer practice, the actual numbers themselves were moved around the registers, not just a pointer.
[…] Hamblin soon became aware of the problems of (a) computing mathematical formulae containing brackets, and (b) the memory overhead in having dealing with memory stores each of which had its own name. One solution to the first problem was Jan Łukasiewicz's Polish notation, which enables a writer of mathematical notation to instruct a reader the order in which to execute the operations (e.g. addition, multiplication, etc) without using brackets. Polish notation achieves this by having an operator (+, ×, etc) precede the operands to which it applies, e.g., +ab, instead of the usual, a+b. Hamblin, with his training in formal logic, knew of Lukasiewicz's work. […]
[…] I changed the architecture to use RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), which is the ideal notation for programming environment in which coding efficiency is critical. In the beginning, that change was not well received... […]
In terms of practical choice between calculators, it would appear that RPN is faster and more accurate overall but particularly for more complex problems.(5 pages)
Die Z3 konnte in zwei Betriebsmodi betrieben werden, und zwar in dem Programm- und Dialogmodus. Das Rechnen im Dialog erfolgt wie mit einem Taschenrechner in der umgekehrten polnischen Notation.[1]
Zum Eingeben der Zahlen stand eine Tastatur bereit (Dezimalzahlen, Gleitkommadarstellung). Anweisungen gaben Nutzer in umgekehrter polnischer Notation: zuerst die Argumente, um Register zu befüllen, dann der auszuführende Operator.
Dazu stehen die beiden Register R1 und R2 als Kurzspeicher für die Operanden der arithmetischen Operationen zur Verfügung. Gerechnet wird in der umgekehrten polnischen Notation, wie z.B. beim Taschenrechner HP 45 (1972) oder HP11 (1998).(5 pages)
The computer can be used as a simple hand-held calculator. In this mode besides entering the numeric values the user must enter the instructions and the addresses by pressing their keys. He has to enter the numbers and operators in the reverse Polish notation.
Er hat wohl auch als erster die vom polnischen Mathematiker Jan Lukasiewicz entwickelte ›polnische Notation‹ weiterentwickelt und daraus die ›umgekehrte polnische Notation‹ (UPN) ersonnen, da diese in seinen Rechnern verwendet wird: zunächst werden die Werte eingegeben, danach die gewünschte Rechenoperation ausgelöst. Klammern werden auf diese Weise vermieden.(4 pages)
Über die I/O-Einheit kann man die Z3 als reine Rechenmaschine einsetzen, Operationen nimmt sie dann in der praktischen – wenn auch gewöhnungsbedürftigen – umgekehrten polnischen Notation entgegen. Werte im Speicher ablegen (oder von dort laden) kann man so allerdings nicht.
[…] The KDF9 is remarkable because it is the believed to be the first zero-address instruction format computer to have been announced (in 1960). It was first delivered at about the same time (early 1963) as the other famous zero-address computer, the Burroughs B5000 in America. Like many modern pocket calculators, a zero-address machine allows the use of Reverse Polish arithmetic; this offers certain advantages to compiler writers. It is believed that the attention of the English Electric team was first drawn to the zero-address concept through contact with George (General Order Generator), an autocode programming system written for a Deuce computer by the University of Sydney, Australia, in the latter half of the 1950s. George used Reversed Polish, and the KDF9 team were attracted to this convention for the pragmatic reason of wishing to enhance performance by minimising accesses to main store. This may be contrasted with the more "theoretical" line taken independently by Burroughs. Besides a hardware nesting store or stack - the basic mechanism of a zero-address computer - the KDF9 had other groups of central registers for improving performance which gave it an interesting internal structure. […][2] (NB. This is an edited version of a talk given to North West Group of the Society at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK on 1996-10-01.)
[…] Bob holds over 80 patents awarded during his work as Director of RD for Friden, and Singer and as Senior Project Engineer at Xerox. He retired from Xerox RD in 1990. He is responsible for the development of the first commercial electronic calculator, the Friden 130, which has been displayed at the Smithsonian. […]
DATA STORAGE: 2 Auxiliary Storage Registers plus up to 7 push-up Stack Registers. […] 7400A 3 Registers Kit $299.95 Assembled $379.95 […] 7400B 5 Registers Kit $319.95 Assembled $399.95 […] 7400C 7 Registers Kit $339.95 Assembled $419.95
Er hat wohl auch als erster die vom polnischen Mathematiker Jan Lukasiewicz entwickelte ›polnische Notation‹ weiterentwickelt und daraus die ›umgekehrte polnische Notation‹ (UPN) ersonnen, da diese in seinen Rechnern verwendet wird: zunächst werden die Werte eingegeben, danach die gewünschte Rechenoperation ausgelöst. Klammern werden auf diese Weise vermieden.(4 pages)
Er hat wohl auch als erster die vom polnischen Mathematiker Jan Lukasiewicz entwickelte ›polnische Notation‹ weiterentwickelt und daraus die ›umgekehrte polnische Notation‹ (UPN) ersonnen, da diese in seinen Rechnern verwendet wird: zunächst werden die Werte eingegeben, danach die gewünschte Rechenoperation ausgelöst. Klammern werden auf diese Weise vermieden.(4 pages)
In terms of practical choice between calculators, it would appear that RPN is faster and more accurate overall but particularly for more complex problems.(5 pages)
Er hat wohl auch als erster die vom polnischen Mathematiker Jan Lukasiewicz entwickelte ›polnische Notation‹ weiterentwickelt und daraus die ›umgekehrte polnische Notation‹ (UPN) ersonnen, da diese in seinen Rechnern verwendet wird: zunächst werden die Werte eingegeben, danach die gewünschte Rechenoperation ausgelöst. Klammern werden auf diese Weise vermieden.(4 pages)
[…] The KDF9 is remarkable because it is the believed to be the first zero-address instruction format computer to have been announced (in 1960). It was first delivered at about the same time (early 1963) as the other famous zero-address computer, the Burroughs B5000 in America. Like many modern pocket calculators, a zero-address machine allows the use of Reverse Polish arithmetic; this offers certain advantages to compiler writers. It is believed that the attention of the English Electric team was first drawn to the zero-address concept through contact with George (General Order Generator), an autocode programming system written for a Deuce computer by the University of Sydney, Australia, in the latter half of the 1950s. George used Reversed Polish, and the KDF9 team were attracted to this convention for the pragmatic reason of wishing to enhance performance by minimising accesses to main store. This may be contrasted with the more "theoretical" line taken independently by Burroughs. Besides a hardware nesting store or stack - the basic mechanism of a zero-address computer - the KDF9 had other groups of central registers for improving performance which gave it an interesting internal structure. […][2] (NB. This is an edited version of a talk given to North West Group of the Society at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK on 1996-10-01.)
DATA STORAGE: 2 Auxiliary Storage Registers plus up to 7 push-up Stack Registers. […] 7400A 3 Registers Kit $299.95 Assembled $379.95 […] 7400B 5 Registers Kit $319.95 Assembled $399.95 […] 7400C 7 Registers Kit $339.95 Assembled $419.95
