From today's point of view some people think that 8 bit bytes and 32
bit words have existed forever.
In contrast:
byte sizes: 6, 8, 12 bits
word size: 16, 18, 22, 24, 32, 36, 48, 60, 64
address size: 16, 18, 22, 24, 31, 32, ...
number format: 2's complement, 1's complement, sign/magnitude
from the late 1960s until mid of the 1980s, we had a machine in Germany
with
48 bits word size - in fact: 48 + 2 tag bits (visible to the programmer)
+ 2 parity bits
24 bits instruction and address size (halfwords addressable, words have
even addresses)
bytes of 6, 8 or 12 bits (words can have 8, 6 or 4 bytes) - 12 bit bytes
used by Fortran (INTEGER*4) - in fact 8 bits and 4 zeros
some special instructions can address 8 bit bytes ("Oktadenadressen") -
8 bit bytes used by COBOL, Pascal etc.
and: 1's complement
other languages on that machine: PL/1, ALGOL, BCPL
and the machine had a very powerful time-sharing dialog system (for
developers)
some 50 machines of this type have been built, one costed about 20
millions Deutsche Marks
used by universities, research institutes, some government agencies and
the German army
http://www.vaxman.de/historic_computers/telefunken/tr440/tr440.html
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR_440
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 23.04.2020 um 23:33 schrieb Seymour J Metz:
?
Byte addressing on the 1106 was direct, specified in the j field of the
instruction. Indirect addressing only used the right 22 bits of the indirect
address word. At least on the 1106 you had a choice of byte sizes.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of
Pierre Fichaud [pr...@videotron.ca]
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 3:56 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Here we go again;
I remember one summer working on a Univac-1106 in assembler.
Ones complement, 36 bit-words.
Indirect addressing to a byte.
I wasn't crazy about it having come from the IBM world and direct byte
addressability.
But it was a job.
Pierre.
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