Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: More than 32 bits needed where?
Summary: anyone for 48?
Message-ID: <625@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 5 Feb 88 12:01:50 GMT
References: <235@unicom.UUCP> <28200089@ccvaxa> <3104@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <19667@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 16

In article <19667@bu-cs.BU.EDU>, bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
writes about "Commercial" instruction sets.

The Burroughs B6700 and its successors (I can never remember the latest
name for these machines, is it "E-mode"?) had 48-bit single precision
arithmetic and 96-bit double precision arithmetic.  Integers were a
special case of floats, meaning that you got about 11 decimal digits
(single) or 23 (double).  Having used 48-bit (B6700) and 36-bit (DEC-10)
machines, even working at the instruction level of both (a friend and I
had a hacked version of the B6700 Algol compiler which had an equivalent
of asm("..")), I have never understood why "word-length = a power of two"
has such a hypnotic effect on people.  Burroughs considered the needs of
COBOL, and decided that they'd get more value for money by concentrating
on binary arithmetic and providing fast decimal<->integer conversion.

If 32 bits isn't enough, why not go to 48 as the next step?