Just ignore it. It is just another lame ass top-n list in disguise. Sort of like the culinary equivalent of Cheez Whiz on a Ritz. -- Will

Geez, out of the entire gang of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he sure missed a lot of the little fellows, didn't he? I know--NCR made cash registers; GE made toasters, RCA made TVs, Honeywell made thermostats, Not to mention Philco, Packard Bell, SDS, Tandem, Amdahl,... or Nixdorf, ICL, English Electric, Olivetti... or NEC or Fujitsu or any of the Soviet-era systems. He describes the CDC6600 as "was very limited in the instructions it could perform". Huh?? Compared to what? One little-known aspect was that the 6600 smoked any of the IBM iron of that time when running COBOL. --Chuck

On 2 Jul 2009 at 16:36, Warren Wolfe wrote: Uh, you mean 12 bits, not 18. The mantissa was 48 bits. A and B registers were 18 bits (as was the A register in the PPUs). The high-order bit of an FP number was the sign of the mantissa; the exponent was biased by 2000 octal (i.e. range from 0000 to 3777). That was convenient because the 6000 had no condition codes-- conditional branches were performed based on the value of a specific register, so a sign test on the high-order bit worked for both integers and floating point numbers. 0000...000 was zero for both. The 6000 series had only add and subtract for 60 bit integers; multiply and divide on integers were performed by using the floating- point instructions. (There was later an "Integer Multiply" special feature that performed an integer multiply with the mantissas=0000 instead of 2000 (octal). It wasn't any faster, but you didn't have to pack and unpack (i.e. add and remove and exponent) the 2000 bias to the numbers). One oddity is that a double-precision operation involved issuing separate instructions to obtain the upper and lower parts of a result. So, to multiply two integers, you used the double-precision multiply and obtained the lower 48 bits of a 96 bit product. Normalization of the result mantissa was not guaranteed unless both operands were normalized. But in COBOL, a lot of fancy bit-twiddling (courtesy mostly of Rick James) allowed for direct addition of decimal numbers (10 digits at a pass), zero or space filling and quick conversion from decimal to binary with no branching. It was possible to write a memory-to- memory move that kept the both store units busy. Coding for that machine was fun--the scheduling rules for instructions were very well documented. --Chuck

Perhaps, but really past the early 1960s, the mainframe market *was* American-centric. The British and German mainframe computer industries pretty much dropped the ball, and were mostly insignificant by the 1970s. The Japanese, however, started to become a bit of a force in the late 1970s. The list seems a bit IBM-centric. I hate these list articles. Cheap journalism, basically. -- Will