Happy DEC-20 Day!

On 20 Dec 2009 at 17:04, William Donzelli wrote: A google on "48 bit word" turns up the following: "Incidentally, a somewhat larger number of computers had a 48-bit word length; some of them had 24-bit instructions, others 48-bit instructions, and some had variable-length instructions: the Control Data 1604 and 3600, the Honeywell 400, 800 and 1800 (and their progenitor, the Datamatic D1000), the Philco 2000 (whose central processor could have been the Philco 210, 211, or 212, and which was therefore sometimes referred to as the Philco 2000 Model 212 with a Philco 212 central processor), the RCA 601, the Maniac II, the AN/FSQ- 31 and AN/FSQ-32, which were both made by IBM for the U.S. government, the Elliot 4130 (later the I.C.L. 4130), the FACOM 202, the University of Manchester Atlas, and the I.C.T. Orion are computers with that word length. As is the BESM-6 from the Soviet Union, and several computers from the People's Republic of China: the Model 109C, the DJS-6 (also known as the Model 108B), the DJS-8 (also known as the Model 320), and an early prototype machine based on integrated circuits, the Model 013. Photographs of some of those computers are visible here; a larger picture of the Model 013 front panel appeared in an issue of Datamation magazine. DJS stands for Dianzi Jisuanji, the Putonghua phrase for "computer" (electronic calculator); the Kuo-y? phrase for computer is Tien Nao (electric brain) (in Pinyin, Diannao). Because the Burroughs B5500 and B6700 computers used a word containing 48 bits of data, but also extra bits that described the type of the data which played an important role in programming the machine, I would consider that series sufficiently out-of-the- ordinary to attempt to discuss here; the same applies to the English Electric KDF9 computer, which was stack-oriented like the Burroughs machine. The Telefunken TR440 computer also added two descriptor bits to each word with 48 bits of data, but these seem to only serve to protect the machine against accidentally interpreting instructions as data, or integers as floating-point quantities: its instructions were 24 bits long, with an 8-bit opcode and either a 16-bit address or two 8-bit indexed addresses, but I have not yet been able to derive the structure of an 8-bit address from the available references." http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cp0303.htm --Chuck