From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 1997 17:22:34 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Book Recommendation: "Supermen" (about Cray, Norris, CDC, etc.)
In-Reply-To: <v03007804af69d29e23d8@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <um2L5D45w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> writes:
> Next came the vaunted 6600, after almost not being funded to completion. It
> waws the first true supercomputer. Cray had moved his team up to Chippewa
  ^^^^???

I used to play with a 6600. It had some interesting hardware features:
* It used one's complement rather than two's complement to represent negative
integers. (I.e. -x is the same as not x; a pattern of all 1's is '-0'.)
* It had 60-bit words for both integers and single-precision reals.
A 120-bit double precision was pretty slow. A word could fit 10 6-bit
characters, but any kind of text processing was a bitch.
* 15-bit addresses referred to the whole word. A word could contain
several instructions, but only an instruction on a word boundary
could be a target of a branch.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps