History
Rake receivers must have either a general-purpose CPU or some other form of digital signal processing hardware in them to process and correlate the intended signal. Rake receivers only became common after 16-bit CPUs capable of signal processing became widely available. The rake receiver was patented in the US in 1956, but it took until the 1970s to design practical implementations of the receiver.
Radio astronomers were the first substantial users of rake receivers in the late 1960s to mid-1980s as this kind of receiver could scan large sky regions yet not create large volumes of data beyond what most data recorders could handle at the time. Astropulse that is part of SETI@Home project uses a variant of a rake receiver as part of its sky searches—so this kind of receiver is still current for the needs of radio astronomy.
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