reiter@endor.harvard.edu (Ehud Reiter) (05/15/87)
I've just been reading the article on 360/370 architecture in the April issue of Communications of the ACM. In this article, it says that the only reason the 360/370 series had a packed decimal data type was because one of the original machines (360/30?) had an 8-bit data path. The article also said the 360/370 EDIT instruction is regarded as a mistake now. Now, the VAX has a packed decimal data type. If I remember correctly, it also has a form of EDIT instruction. My question is, does anyone know why DEC put these features into the VAX? Did they have a reason, or were they just trying to make the VAX instruction set a "superset" of the 360's? Ehud Reiter reiter@harvard (ARPA,BITNET,UUCP) reiter@harvard.harvard.EDU (new ARPA i