[TUHS] Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jim Capp

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

Blast! I looked in the index in my copy (ex the Caltech CS Dept Library :-),
but didn't find 'word' in the index!

Looking a little further, Turing's ACE Report, from 1946, uses the term
(section 4, pg. 25; "minor cycle, or word"). My copy, the one edited by
Carpenter and Doran, has a note #1 by them, "Turing seems to be the first
user of 'word' with this meaning." I have Brian's email, I can ask him how
they came to that determination, if you'd like.

There aren't many things older than that! I looked quickly through the "First
Draft on the EDVAC", 1945 (re-printed in "From ENIAC to UNIVAC", by Stein),
but did not see word there. It does use the term "minor cycle", though.

Other places worth checking are the IBM/Harvard Mark I, the ENIAC and ...
I guess therer's not much else! Oh, there was a relay machine at Bell, too.
The Atanasoff-Berry computer?


    > From: "John P. Linderman"

    > 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.

The EDVAC draft talks about needing 8 decimal digits (Appendix A, pg.190);
apparently von Neumann knew that that's how many digits one needed for
reasonable accuracy in differential equations. That is 27 "binary digits"
(apparently 'bit' hadn't been coined yet).

	Noel