The MIT Life hackers once got an absolutely surreal demo of the "PDP-3" in the basement of Searle Medidata, out on rte 128, by it's sole caretaker, builder(?), and programmer Charles Corderman. If memory serves, some salesman leaked that DEC was building a 36 bit challenge to IBM's mainframes, and Searle staked much on this belief. When it became clear that DEC was abandoning the project, Searle insisted on seeing the plans, and charged Corderman with completing them. The machine computed parity nearly everywhere. What a waste of bits. So Corderman changed it to a 37bit machine! He then built an *entirely* menu-driven OS, where the only pointing device was a light pen! To make things weirder, the Type 30 display had a purple phosphor. On the console was a Flexowriter, powered off. We expressed suspicion that he had programmed his (utterly peculiar) OS on it. "No, but it does work," he said, powering it on, and waving his light pen. The Flexowriter typed a lowercase "r", and he powered it off. (Kids: The only data from a light pen is a single bit, saying whether or not it saw the most recent point flashed on the (non rastered) screen. During one second, the machine was only fast enough to light a very few thousand of the 2^20 addressable points. The pen's field of view depended on how close it was to the screen, but it needed to be pretty close. How can you possibly do anything useful with such a thing?) This is the machine with which Corderman found his famous Switch Engines, http://www.conwaylife.com/w/index.php?title=Switch_engine , bizarre c/12 diagonal puffers, one of which shoots (Doppler shifted) gliders out the front! Or did I dream all this? --rwg On 2017-06-07 16:39, Fred Lunnon wrote:
Manchester Atlas I with 48-bit words. WFL
On 6/8/17, Eugene Salamin via math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> wrote:
My first computer was the IBM 650. It had 2000 10-decimal digit words stored on a rotating magnetic drum. Senior year in high school class in applied math in 1959, IBM gave us access to their computer. It was punch cards, card sorters, and line printers.
-- Gene
On Wednesday, June 7, 2017, 3:52:26 PM PDT, Victor Miller <victorsmiller@gmail.com> wrote:
And 60 bit (cdc). I also programmed a univac 418 -- 18 bit 1's complement
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 18:40 Tom Knight <tk@mit.edu> wrote:
You left out the 40 bit machines…
On Jun 7, 2017, at 3:50 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
FYI --
"Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I'm 64?"
I've now lived through:
decimal computers (IBM 1620, IBM 1401) 36-bit/15-18bit-address computers (IBM 7040, IBM 7090, GE635, PDP-10, DEC-20) 12-bit computers (PDP-8) Microcoded machines (Xerox Alto, Lisp Machines) 1-bit computers (ICL DAP 32x32x1 "square word", Connection Machine) 4-bit computers (Intel 4004) 8-bit computers (6502, Z-80, 8080, 8051 (still used inside "USB flash drives"!), 6800, etc.) 16-bit computers (PDP-11, Moto 68000, 8086, etc.) 32-bit computers (IBM 360, VAX, 80386, ARM, etc.) 64-bit computers (everyone!)
It remains to be seen if I'll make it to 128 or 256...
Son of a bits! ---
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17/06/07/0538233/apple-to-phase-out-32-bit-...
Apple To Phase Out 32-Bit Mac Apps Starting In January 2018
Apple will be phasing out 32-bit apps with iOS 11, and soon the
company will make the same changes on its macOS operating system. During its Platform State of the Union keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple told developers that macOS High Sierra will be the "last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromises."