eli5 How do calculators work?
In: 11
Id go watch youtube videos on how mechanical calculators work, they existed long before digital stuff.
In essence, they use sequences of 9 tooth gears that have a full revolution of one gear making the next gear go up by 1 that also resets themselves to 0 at that point. You have a master sequence of gears, the output, that stores the results. So you might put in 7 as your first digit, the out put turns to 7 in the same gear (or column when we do it on paper) – the same thing that first gear is set to. You want to add 3, so you set it to add 3 more turns and it flips to 0 and marks the next gear forward a tooth to 1. You now have the output as 10. You then want to add 7 to it again, so you rotate that first gear by 7 and the output now displays 17. You want to add 100 so the third gear goes forward by 1, you now have 117.
It gets more complicated after that with division and multiplication as its doing shifts of positions and you start realizing people are reallllllly clever that came up with this crap.
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