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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: machine word sizes
Message-ID: <19881@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 27-Jul-87 17:27:10 EDT
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Posted: Mon Jul 27 17:27:10 1987
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In article <1184@k.cs.cmu.edu> lindsay@k.cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay) writes:
>I believe that John Von Neumann chose 36 bits as giving the precision he
>wanted for arithmetic calculation. This was in the early 1950's, when
>floating point hardware was too expensive to be worthwhile.
The way I heard the story, one of the early demo programs was a checkers
game (without kings), and 36 bits was just enough to hold the game state
including the board boundaries.