Book Recommendation: "Supermen" (about Cray, Norris, CDC, etc.)

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM dlv at bwalk.dm.com
Thu Apr 3 17:22:34 PST 1997


"Timothy C. May" <tcmay at 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






More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list