From Herb Grosch, Computer: Bit Slices of a Life: > The 36-bit word size was probably unfortunate, and it most certainly stretched the abilities of customer pr

From Herb Grosch, Computer: Bit Slices of a Life: > The 36-bit word size was probably unfortunate, and it most certainly stretched the abilities of customer problem analysts and programming experts later. When you chopped off a piece for the exponent (and sign) in floating point - which in spite of my Jeremiads all the customers except maybe the cryptologists insisted on using - there wasn't really enough left for accurate matrix calculations. Or astronomy, but I could already see before the design was fully roughed out that not much of Wallace's stuff was ever going to run on a Defense Calculator! Anyhow, it was too late; looking back from the Eighties, I guessed 48 bits would have been optimal; the 360/370 experience showed us that 32 is not enough, and 64 would have been wasteful. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/computer.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/computer.html