Sign magnitude, one's complement, two's complement

Al Kossow aek at bitsavers.org
Sat Aug 22 16:49:50 CDT 2015


On 8/22/15 2:23 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
>
>    For my own morbid curiosity, and because it came up on another mailing
> list I'm on [1], what machines commercially avaialble were sign magnitude
> and one's complement?

A table of what computers had what numeric representation is one of those things
that should have been done, but never has. Now that bitsavers has a reasonable collection
of technical/programming manuals, it might even be possible.

http://quadibloc.com/comp/cpint.htm

has some information, but it isn't really in any sort of tabular form.

AFAIK, the PDP-1 was the only DEC 1's compliment machine that shipped.

I had also heard that 1's compliment never caught on in short word length
machines because of the difficulty dealing with multi-word arithmetic.






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