A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems

[Chuck Guzis]

On 7/27/2006 at 12:54 PM Fred Cisin wrote:

>Late 1970's, early 1980's.  Or BEFORE.
>There were a few marketing types bragging that their microcomputers had
>65.536K of memory (v the competition at only 64K?)

I can recall back in the 60's seeing the term "131K" for a CDC system.  At
the same time, IBM was pretty clear about 64K = 65,536.  Now, back then, it
was even more confusing.  The "K" that IBM was talking about on its S/360
machines was 8-bit bytes; the CDC was talking about 60-bit words.
Apples-to-apples comparison was a lot more difficult.  If you were a DP
type and were concerned about "characters", then the CDC machine at 131K
words could hold 1,310,720 6-bit characters.