Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fr 28 Feb 2025 at 17:36, antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) wrote:

In alt.folklore.computers Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) writes:

In alt.folklore.computers Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:

c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> writes:
>

Hey ... even a "word" was kinda undefined for awhile. Remember octal ? 12-bit
"words" ?  :-)

>
You're just being silly.
>
The word size in the PDP-5/PDP-8 is 12 bits.  There's no need for scare quotes
around the word "word".  The addressable memory unit in that architecture is
the word, so 4096KW is 49,152 bits, with addresses 0 to 4095 (most often
expressed in octal as 0 to 7777).

>
What "KW" means above?

>
Kilowords.
$ printf "%f\n" $(( 49152.0 / 4096.0 ))
12.000000

>
But the 49152 bits is 4096 _words_, so KW is clearly not kilowords.

It is 4KW. 4096 = 1024 * 4 = 4 * 2^10.

"Andreas

--
ceterum censeo redmondinem esse delendam