[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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