> possibly because the early Motorola 68000 processor chips didn't have 32 bit unsigned multiply operations. This doesn't really make sense as an explanation.

> possibly because the early Motorola 68000 processor chips didn't have 32 bit unsigned multiply operations. This doesn't really make sense as an explanation. For both signed and unsigned multiply, the 68000 has a 16x16 -> 32 multiply. This is indeed kind of inconvenient if you need to multiply 32-bit numbers, but 31-bit numbers are not any easier. If anything, the unsigned cases is easier to reason about than the signed one