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Re: Book Recommendation: "Supermen" (about Cray, Norris, CDC, etc.)
- To: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: Book Recommendation: "Supermen" (about Cray, Norris, CDC, etc.)
- From: [email protected] (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
- Date: Thu, 03 Apr 97 19:24:05 EST
- Comments: All power to the ZOG!
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected][207.167.93.63]>
- Organization: Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.
- Sender: [email protected]
"Timothy C. May" <[email protected]> writes:
> Next came the vaunted 6600, after almost not being funded to completion. It
> waws the first true supercomputer. Cray had moved his team up to Chippewa
^^^^???
I used to play with a 6600. It had some interesting hardware features:
* It used one's complement rather than two's complement to represent negative
integers. (I.e. -x is the same as not x; a pattern of all 1's is '-0'.)
* It had 60-bit words for both integers and single-precision reals.
A 120-bit double precision was pretty slow. A word could fit 10 6-bit
characters, but any kind of text processing was a bitch.
* 15-bit addresses referred to the whole word. A word could contain
several instructions, but only an instruction on a word boundary
could be a target of a branch.
---
<a href="mailto:[email protected]">Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps