off topic - capatob - saratov2 computer Russsian pdp8

Guy Sotomayor Jr ggs at shiresoft.com
Sun Jan 6 22:28:44 CST 2019


> On Jan 6, 2019, at 6:10 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 01/06/2019 01:29 PM, Bob Smith via cctalk wrote:
>> Sorry, thanks for playing but
>> Actually half of a WORD is a BYTE, whatever the numerical length is.
>> Ready for this,half of a BYTE is a NIBBLE.
> Well, no.  On 32-bit machines such as IBM 360, VAX, etc. half a 32-bit word is a halfword,
> the fullword is equal to FOUR bytes.  On a 360/65 and above, the memory word was 64 bits, or a double-word, so half that was a fullword.  Just makes it more confusing.

No it doesn’t.  The 360/65 was still a 32-bit processor (as defined by the ISA).  It makes no difference what the width to memory was.  Wider memory is only to improve the bandwidth to memory.  That’s like saying the current Intel ixxx CPUs (which are 64-bit ISA) are “confusing” because the width to memory is 256-bits.

TTFN - Guy



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