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From: Jim Capp <jcapp@anteil.com>
To: Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2022 15:28:01 -0400 (EDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <833155.3451.1662665281061.JavaMail.root@zimbraanteil> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20220908182051.502B118C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

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See "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer", by Maurice V. Wilkes, David J. Wheeler, and Stanley Gill, copyright 1951, 

pp. 5 section 1-4: "The store is divided into a number of registers or storage locations; the content of a storage location is a sequence of 0's and 1's, and may represent an order or a number. 


The term word is used for the content of a storage location if it is desired to refer to it without specifying whether it represents a number or an order." 


Jim 







From: "Noel Chiappa" <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> 
To: tuhs@tuhs.org 
Cc: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu 
Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2022 2:20:51 PM 
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits? 

> It was used, in the modern sense, in "Planning a Computer System", 
> Buchholz,1962. 

Also in the IBM "650 Manual of Operation", June, 1955. (Before I was 
born! :-) 

Noel 

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  reply	other threads:[~2022-09-08 19:28 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 27+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-09-08 18:20 Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 19:28 ` Jim Capp [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2022-09-11 13:30 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-11 15:08 ` John Cowan
2022-09-11 15:30 ` Bakul Shah
2022-09-11 15:45   ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-11 16:20     ` Steve Nickolas
2022-09-09 19:39 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2022-09-09 20:27 ` Bakul Shah
2022-09-09 21:12   ` Henry Bent
2022-09-09 21:44   ` Dave Horsfall
2022-09-09 18:46 Norman Wilson
2022-09-10  1:35 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-09 17:26 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-09  1:33 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-09  2:12 ` Larry McVoy
2022-09-13 14:23   ` John Foust via TUHS
2022-09-09  2:45 ` George Michaelson
2022-09-16  5:55 ` Marc Donner
2022-09-08 21:16 Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 21:24 ` Dan Halbert
2022-09-08 16:51 [TUHS] " Jon Steinhart
2022-09-08 16:56 ` [TUHS] " Andrew Hume
2022-09-08 17:28 ` Dan Halbert
2022-09-09  0:00   ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-09-09 15:49     ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-09 18:44       ` Bakul Shah

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