29 Sep
2026
29 Sep
'26
12:18 p.m.
On Sep 29, 2026, at 2:12 PM, Antonio Carlini via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 29/09/2026 18:22, ben via cctalk wrote:
That's certainly a start but just the bare beginning. I suspect that, unti lthe
IBM/360, most machines had word lengths not a power of two. For example, none of the DEC
machines before the PDP-11. Older IBM machines had assorted word sizes; CDC and Burroughs
ditto. I worked on a 1970s era Philips machine with 24 bits, and there were other
minicomputer with that word length (Modcomp?). Electrologica had 27 bit words. The MC
research machines had word lengths of 30 and 34 bits (the 34 bit one, ARMAC, was a
successor of the 30 bit ARRA 2 with a very similar instruction set, two instructions per
word, but the address space grew from 1k to 4k so the word was made 4 bits larger). ENIAC
was 40 bits I think.
I would count the sign since it's part of the data representation, but not the parity
bit. And on Burroughs mainframes the 3 tag bits are usually not mentioned; if you do
include them (sensible, since they carry semantic information) you end up with a word size
of 51 bits. Not often you run into prime numbers for the word size.
paul
On 2026-09-28 4:45 p.m., Jim Davis via cctalk
wrote:
Oddly enough I've been compiling a list of non-power-of-two machines and Ai does a
good (or at least credible) job of turning web pages I don't understand into ones I
think mostly match DeepL and Google Translate.
Here's a starting list. I've not checked it but a few of the machine son there
(like some of the Odra ones) are real (in the sense that I've independently found info
about them, not that I've ever seen them ... but then I've never seen a PDP-1
either).
Now I have to decide whether the Dnepr-1 counts as 26 bits for my list ... should
parity/sign count?? Oh, and I was missing a 29-bit example ... so more checking to do (you
never know, it might have imagined it!) It's better than it's 2+2=5 (for large
values of 2) and reporting the
moon is made of green cheese days.
last week, In a mildly pissed session,
We/i/it did a sketch of an analog tensor cell, just op amps and floating gates
Digital on the in and out, but a 1M^2 cells in the core. AI's agree,
It looks good.
Give it a try, Promise you won't get your hand blown off playing with
improvised explosives.
And how soon will ****** start with hidden charges for AI service?
Normal google searches seem just skim off top five sites and repeat from them.
What if I want to find all the computers made in Eastern Europe between 1958 and 1975 18
to 30 bits wide, and the data translated to English.
When a AI can do that let me know.