Coherent Dedispersion: History and Results

The high time resolution afforded by coherent dedispersion has enabled precision pulsar timing, detailed studies of pulsar morphology, and has led to conclusions about the radio emission mechanism. The advance of technology in the last 50 years has enhanced the capability of coherent dedispersion, now used for most pulsar observing, by nearly six orders of magnitude. Although coherent dedispersion is now done mostly in software, in ``earlier days'' several novel hardware devices for real-time processing were developed.