[TUHS] Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?
Dave Horsfall
dave at horsfall.org
Sat Sep 10 07:44:57 AEST 2022
On Fri, 9 Sep 2022, Bakul Shah wrote:
> And yet according to Wilner's article "the B1700 appears to require less
> than half the memory needed by byte-oriented systems to represent
> programs. Comparisons with word-oriented systems are even more
> favorable."
The Burroughs series were beautiful machines; the hardware ran native
ALGOL (and thus were perfect); my favourite "B" still remains the B1500.
Things went downhill after the unholy alliance betwixt M$ and Inhell...
> Figure 9 shows sample sizes for Cobol, Fortran and RPG II programs
> comparing B1700 code sizes with other systems. I was surprised to
> see this but didn't look further.
COBOL? FORTRAN? RPG? Those are all swear words to me :-)
-- Dave
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