The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits
@ 2022-09-08 18:01 Noel Chiappa
  2022-09-08 19:22 ` John P. Linderman
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2022-09-08 18:01 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > On Sep 8, 2022, at 9:51 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:

    > One of those questions for which there is no search engine incantation.

Whatever it is, it's really old. I found it used, not quite in the modern
sense, in "Hi-Speed Computing Devices", by ERA, 1950. It was used, in the
modern sense, in "Planning a Computer System", Buchholz,1962.

	Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits
  2022-09-08 18:01 [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits Noel Chiappa
@ 2022-09-08 19:22 ` John P. Linderman
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: John P. Linderman @ 2022-09-08 19:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Noel Chiappa; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1533 bytes --]

In Brailsford's youtube series in Computerphile (something I came across
through BWK's interview with Brailsford),
Episode 86
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixJCo0cyAuA&list=PLUTypj9XuPp4YBaHucPvr-zisHwfEGIEq&index=87>
is
about "Where Did Bytes Come From?".  He claims that if you wanted to do
decimal arithmetic on a
binary machine, you'd want to have 10 digits of accuracy to capture the 10
digit log tables that were then popular.
10 digits is around 33 to 36 bits, so words ended up that size (or half
that size), 36 or 18 bits. (Brailsford's lectures are
fabulous, by the way, likely to appeal to TUHS types.)

I like that explanation better than the story I heard that the IBM 709
series had 36 bit words because Arthur Samuel,
then at IBM, needed 32 bits to identify the playable squares on a
checkerboard, plus some bits for color and kinged
(if that's the proper term for getting across the board and gaining the
ability to move toward either side). Samuel was
famous for writing a checker playing program that played champion-quality
checkers.

On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 2:02 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>     > On Sep 8, 2022, at 9:51 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
>     > One of those questions for which there is no search engine
> incantation.
>
> Whatever it is, it's really old. I found it used, not quite in the modern
> sense, in "Hi-Speed Computing Devices", by ERA, 1950. It was used, in the
> modern sense, in "Planning a Computer System", Buchholz,1962.
>
>         Noel
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2566 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-09-08 19:24 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-09-08 18:01 [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 19:22 ` John P. Linderman

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).