Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1356

... snip lots of background ...

Oh well, as a computer architect I don't need all the details, just the minimum size required please maam. Looks as if 24 bits is adequate and leaves room for future changes. I think I'll just design with that as the addressable unit, and make integers and pointers two units long at 48 bits. That gives me a pretty decent floating point size, and extra precision can fit nicely into 72 or 96 bits. 96 bits plus an ECC syndrome will fit into 104 bits, which is my memory path width. Individual memory modules (chips) will need to be 13 bits wide, because we don't really want to require 104 chips per module.

The 48 bit pointer addressing 24 bit units should allow for memory expansion in the forseeable future, even with Microsoft bloat. The 72 and 96 bit units should allow for future disk sizes also.

Now that that is all settled ....

BTW, the SDS machines used 24 bits circa 1963 IIRC.

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