32bit vs. 64bit

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Mar-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| In the good old days (though I'm probably too young to talk seriously
| about those) when Fortran and single precision ruled, error analysis
| was just more important for computations to actually work.

Back in the good old days some of the fastest systems for numerical
computing (CDC 6x00, for example) had 60-bit words, and Fortran REAL
values were 60 bits wide.  So yeah, single precision ruled, but it
provided more than the 32 bits commonly used for single precision
today.  Similarly, Cray-1, 2, XMP, YMP, etc. systems had 64-bit
"single" precision (i.e., Fortran REAL).

jwe