All this debate about Wright v Pearce causes me to recall an article I read many years ago (possibly published in connection with 50th anniversary of Wright flight) about another American pioneer, who may have had a good claim to have built the first successful aircraft, although he never flew it, and it didn't fly until after the Wrights. As I recall, the story was that he built a number of successful models before building a manned machine. After several unsuccessful attempts to fly, he became ill, and more or less gave up. He died shortly after the Wrights' flight. But his assistant dragged out the machine and succesfully flew it after his death. Does anyone know the name of this inventor? Or anything more about his aircraft?
Slashdot Mirror
> In particular, you can perform bit-accurate integer arithmetic with floating point numbers if you like.
No you can't. Integers stored in floats are usually normalized, i.e. stored as a mantissa between 0 & 1, and exponent.
Decimal based computers are obsolete. I used one, an IBM 650, in the early 1960s. It was installed in 1958.
All this debate about Wright v Pearce causes me to recall an article I read many years ago (possibly published in connection with 50th anniversary of Wright flight) about another American pioneer, who may have had a good claim to have built the first successful aircraft, although he never flew it, and it didn't fly until after the Wrights.
As I recall, the story was that he built a number of successful models before building a manned machine. After several unsuccessful attempts to fly, he became ill, and more or less gave up. He died shortly after the Wrights' flight. But his assistant dragged out the machine and succesfully flew it after his death.
Does anyone know the name of this inventor? Or anything more about his aircraft?