Why Dividing by Zero Makes a Mechanical Calculator Go Berserk

It doesn't hurt the mechanism. It just keeps subtracting zero until you push whatever division stop button is provided. Or, on the previous model, stop turning the crank.

The article provides links to YouTube videos supposedly explaining the mechanism. Those are videos for mechanical analog computers used in Naval gunnery fire control.

True story: Back when they were beta-ing a famous OS in its first 64-bit version, I found that dividing by zero actually crashed the calculator application. It turned out that they were taking the exception id (as reported by the OS), multiplying it by the size of a pointer, and using it as an offset in a table to find the address of the exception handler routine. (i.e. JMP [id*size+table]) Lo and behold, on the 64-bit version of the architecture, the highest bit was set on the exception id....

>Watch here as a certified mathematician (we can only assume)

>Without a deep look inside this Facit ESA-01, it's hard to tell if this is exactly what's happening

I'm glad modern journalism has freed itself from the rigors of researching the things you want to write an article about.

It's interesting enough to know that I could possibly void my warranty by dividing by zero, rather than throw an annoying exception.

Another bullshit article written about some random video found on YouTube with no context whatsoever. I hate this type of "journalism". TL;DR "Without a deep look inside this Facit ESA-01, it's hard to tell if this is exactly what's happening"

I don't have whatever is needed to play webm files on Safari, so that 12 second video of the two gears downloads instead of playing inline.

That makes sense.

What does not make sense is the name of the video: TerrificVillainousHairstreak.webm

WTF?