25 Oct
2010
25 Oct
'10
2:02 p.m.
On 25 Oct 2010 at 15:41, schoedel at kw.igs.net wrote:
By that standard, the earliest I know of is the
Monrobot XI, 1960.
(Everything earlier I could find with a 32-bit storage word either has
a smaller or a decimal ALU.) Desk-sized, $24500.
More to the point, what sense did a 32-bit machine make prior to 8-
bit character codes (e.g. EBCDIC)? 24 36, 48 and 60 bit machines
made much more sense with 6 bit character codes. All of the above
word lengths are divisble by 6 and 4, so BCD isn't an issue either.
--Chuck