LINE SEGMENT PROPERTIES BY DIGITAL COMPUTER (IBM 650 PROGRAM NO. 7436),

It is frequently necessary in the analysis of free body diagrams, space trusses, or other configurations in space, to compute the lengths and direction cosines of various lines or line segments involved in the problem. Such problems may contain a large number of coordinates for which hand calculation of line segment properties would obviously consume a great deal of time and increase the possibility of error. The use of the IBM 650 Computer to solve for the lengths and direction cosines of line segments will prove to be the faster and more efficient method of computation. Briefly, the computation requires nothing more than simple load card data sheets listing the coordinates of each point along with some input data sheets listing the designated point pairs for the line segments in question. After the data is key-punched into cards it is then submitted along with the Line Segment Properties Program to the computer. The output will yield seven figure accuracy. Author