Re: Fat references

Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@aol.com>
Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:30:47 +0100

          From comp.compilers

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From: Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@aol.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:30:47 +0100
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 09-12-045 09-12-055 10-01-003 10-01-008
Keywords: architecture, history, comment
Posted-Date: 03 Jan 2010 14:44:09 EST

Anton Ertl schrieb:


>>> You must be using ``quad word'' differently from the rest of the world,
>>> where it is understood to be 64 bits, according to this convention:
>>> 16 bits: word
>>> 32 bits: double word
>>> 64 bits: quad word
>> That is VAX. Everyone else uses 32 bits for a word.
>
> No, that's the 8008 and its successors. For the PDP-11 and its
> successors (including the VAX) the 32-bit units were called longwords.


Just the DEC machines had very different byte and word sizes, as had
many other machines predating the era of 8 bit bytes. IMO no special
size should be associated with a "word" in general, it's a machine
specific definition. AFAIR our TR-440 had a memory of 128K words of 52 bits.


DoDi
[Early DEC machines had 18, 12, and 36 bit words, but once the PDP-11
became a success in the early 1970s, byte sizes other than 8 and word
sizes other than 16 and 32 soon withered away. -John]


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