Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!pucc!EGNILGES From: EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Looking for a really odd computer Message-ID: <11795@pucc.Princeton.EDU> Date: 5 Oct 90 15:05:20 GMT References: <2721@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <11791@pucc.Princeton.EDU> <818@garland.UUCP> Reply-To: EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU Organization: Princeton University, NJ Lines: 30 Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article In article <818@garland.UUCP>, jim@garland.UUCP (Jim Darby) writes: >In article <11791@pucc.Princeton.EDU> EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU writes: > >>On page 27 of Andrew S. Tanenbaum's book STRUCTURED COMPUTER ORGANIZA- >>TION (Prentice-Hall 1976), there is a list of computers that have >>been sold commercially and their word size. All are even numbers >>save for one. This is the "Electrologica X8", with "27 bits per cell." >>I have never heard anything else about this machine, which sounds >>like a vacuum cleaner. > >Oh ye modern hackers! Back the good old days I used to The IBM 1401 was a 1959 computer that many middle-aged posters will remember. Although in the terminology of that distant era the 1401 was a character rather than a word machine it can be said to have had a 7-bit word. This was because its 6-bit characters had an extra bit, called a word mark. Word marks delimited fields and (as an unsung side benefit) allowed character arithmetic of completely unlimited precision. This was how I floored my math professor by calculating the precise value of 100 factorial in 1972, years before Mathematica and REXX, two systems which can calculate the exact value of 1000 factorial in seconds. We also managed to compile and execute an interpretive FORTRAN in only 8K of memory...completely on (gack! neep!) punch cards. We're more productive now, but computing sure was fun then. "The dark chasm and abyss of time"