History
IBM's first business computer, the IBM 702 (a vacuum tube machine) of the mid 1950s, implemented integer arithmetic entirely in hardware on digit strings of any length from one to 511 digits. The earliest widespread software implementation of arbitrary precision arithmetic was probably that in Maclisp. Later, around 1980, the operating systems VAX/VMS and VM/CMS offered bignum facilities as a collection of string functions in the one case and in the languages EXEC 2 and REXX in the other.
An early widespread implementation was available via the IBM 1620 of 1959-1970. The 1620 was a decimal-digit machine which used discrete transistors, yet it had hardware (that used lookup tables) to perform integer arithmetic on digit strings of a length that could be from two to whatever memory was available. For floating-point arithmetic, the mantissa was restricted to a hundred digits or fewer, and the exponent was restricted to two digits only. The largest memory supplied offered sixty thousand digits, however Fortran compilers for the 1620 settled on fixed sizes such as ten, though it could be specified on a control card if the default was not satisfactory.
Read more about this topic: Arbitrary-precision Arithmetic
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)