IBM Hexadecimal Floating Point - Cleve Moler on Mathematics and Computing - MATLAB爱好者论坛-LabFans.com

poster · 2024-05-26, 04:48

Our technical support group recently received a request for a tool that would convert IBM System/360 hexadecimal floating point numbers to the IEEE-754 format. I am probably the only one left at MathWorks that actually used IBM mainframe computers. I thought we had seen the last of hexadecimal arithmetic years ago. But, it turns out that the hexadecimal floating point format is alive and well.

Contents

IBM System/360

The System/360 is a family of mainframe computers that IBM introduced in 1965 and that dominated the computer industry until PCs came along twenty years later. They range in size from desk-sized to systems that fill a large room.

Here is a photo of a mid-sized model.

System/360, Model 60. Photo from Ken Shirrif's blog, IBM 360/System Summary.

The System/360 architecture is byte-oriented, so it can handle business data processing as well as scientific and engineering computation. This leads to base-16, rather than base-2 or base-10, floating point arithmetic.

* Binary f*2^e 1/2

2024-05-26, 04:48	#1
poster 高级会员注册日期: 2019-11-21 帖子: 3,006 声望力: 66	IBM Hexadecimal Floating Point - Cleve Moler on Mathematics and Computing Our technical support group recently received a request for a tool that would convert IBM System/360 hexadecimal floating point numbers to the IEEE-754 format. I am probably the only one left at MathWorks that actually used IBM mainframe computers. I thought we had seen the last of hexadecimal arithmetic years ago. But, it turns out that the hexadecimal floating point format is alive and well. Contents IBM System/360 Formats Data Hex_ieee ieee2ibm ibm2ieee Examples Comparison Software IBM System/360 The System/360 is a family of mainframe computers that IBM introduced in 1965 and that dominated the computer industry until PCs came along twenty years later. They range in size from desk-sized to systems that fill a large room. Here is a photo of a mid-sized model. System/360, Model 60. Photo from Ken Shirrif's blog, IBM 360/System Summary. The System/360 architecture is byte-oriented, so it can handle business data processing as well as scientific and engineering computation. This leads to base-16, rather than base-2 or base-10, floating point arithmetic. * Binary f*2^e 1/2