3 Feb
2021
3 Feb
'21
10:32 a.m.
I 'm trying to get my head around a 10-bit
machine optimised for C.
How about 23-bits? That was one of the early ESS machines,
evidently
optimized to make every bit count. (Maybe a prime wordwidth helps
with hashing?)
Whirlwind II (built in 1952), was 16 bits. It took a long while for that
to become common wisdom.
Doug
On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 10:32 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Tue, 2 Feb 2021, Richard Salz wrote:
BBN made a machine "optimized" for C.
It was used in the first
generation ARPAnet gateways.
A word was 10bits. The amount of masking we had to do for some portable
software was unreal.
I'm trying to get my head around a 10-bit machine optimised for C...
Well, if you accept that chars are 10 bits wide then there shouldn't be
(much of) a problem; just forget about the concept of powers of 2, I
guess.
Shades of the 60-bit CDC series, as handling strings was a bit of a
bugger; at least the 12-bit PDP-8 was sort of manageable.
-- Dave