Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!columbia!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster 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 Article-I.D.: ucbvax.19881 Posted: Mon Jul 27 17:27:10 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 28-Jul-87 07:11:55 EDT References: <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <8315@utzoo.UUCP> <2807@phri.UUCP> <565@saturn.ucsc.edu> <1184@k.cs.cmu.edu> Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley Lines: 7 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.