27 Jul
2006
27 Jul
'06
4:08 p.m.
On 7/27/2006 at 12:54 PM Fred Cisin wrote:
Late 1970's, early 1980's. Or BEFORE.
There were a few marketing types bragging that their microcomputers had
65.536K of memory (v the competition at only 64K?)
I can recall back in the 60's seeing the term "131K" for a CDC system. At
the same time, IBM was pretty clear about 64K = 65,536. Now, back then, it
was even more confusing. The "K" that IBM was talking about on its S/360
machines was 8-bit bytes; the CDC was talking about 60-bit words.
Apples-to-apples comparison was a lot more difficult. If you were a DP
type and were concerned about "characters", then the CDC machine at 131K
words could hold 1,310,720 6-bit characters.