Timeline for Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 10 at 17:30 | comment | added | Mark Ransom | Seymour Cray designed a couple of generations of mainframes with 60 bit FP instead of 64 bit, because he thought it was faster. Given that these were the fastest computers ever at the time, he was probably right. It's worth noting he changed his mind later. | |
| May 2, 2021 at 21:33 | comment | added | user1095108 | Coz, 32 + 8 = 40 | |
| Apr 29, 2021 at 19:43 | answer | added | supercat | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 19, 2021 at 15:17 | comment | added | Solomon Slow | @texdr.aft I wish! I spent an entire day searching for any reference to it a few years later when I was working on another project. Never turned up any leads. | |
| Feb 19, 2021 at 12:05 | comment | added | texdr.aft | @SolomonSlow Do you remember the name of the book? | |
| Nov 27, 2020 at 22:30 | comment | added | cup | Our math dept in uni brushed off the PETs as toys until they heard about the 40 bit FP. Then they bought them because it had better precision that their 16-bit minis. | |
| Nov 27, 2020 at 19:49 | answer | added | Kuba hasn't forgotten Monica | timeline score: 4 | |
| Nov 15, 2020 at 23:59 | comment | added | RonJohn | @BobJarvis-ReinstateMonica which is not bad on systems that don't have 16- or 32-bit word boundaries, but a multiple of 5 is still odd (both literally and figuratively). | |
| Nov 15, 2020 at 23:42 | answer | added | gnasher729 | timeline score: 10 | |
| Nov 15, 2020 at 22:40 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | 40 is an even multiple of 8. Eight bits = 1 byte, so 40 bits = 5 bytes. | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:18 | answer | added | Roger | timeline score: 10 | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 23:40 | comment | added | supercat | @HagenvonEitzen: The extended-precision type would have been nice, especially for systems without floating-point hardware, were it not sunk by some annoying design quirks of the 8087 and botched support by ANSI C. | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 22:11 | comment | added | Hagen von Eitzen | IIRC, 80bit floats are used in common FPUs | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 20:13 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Nov 13, 2020 at 16:53 | comment | added | Solomon Slow | Re, "Nowadays, floating point is usually either 32 or 64 bits." More specifically, floating point is usually IEEE 754 floating point. Pior to the publication of that standard in 1985, it was the Wild West: Pretty much every system had its own internal representation for floating point numbers. I saw a book once that was basically a step-by-step instruction manual for how to construct your own floating point system. It was on the desk of my co-worker who was implementing the floating point arithmetic for a Lisp interpreter. | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 15:02 | answer | added | Tim Locke | timeline score: 11 | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 13:55 | answer | added | user | timeline score: 26 | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 13:21 | vote | accept | rwallace | ||
| Nov 13, 2020 at 12:52 | answer | added | Davislor | timeline score: 48 | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 12:43 | answer | added | Radovan Garabík | timeline score: 20 | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 12:12 | history | asked | rwallace | CC BY-SA 4.0 |