IIRC, the PDP 9 was a six bit, and devilishly complex to machine code. The subtlety was elegant.
The 8 bit Apple/Franklin had a well developed assembly language, but what really impressed me was seeing text on a screen. The 16 bit PC put the text up here in color and added the IBM box characters to organize datafields. But if you what you are doing is reading and writing text, 32 or 64 bits dont add anything but complexity. The inherited primate part of the human brain responds well to color (fruit), which is why 'red ink' dated from long before computers. But using the GUI to add texture that looks like watermarked 40 pound bond does look nice, but adds nothing whatever to the content of the text. If it did, Books would have used that long ago. But the fact is that books are still being printed on plain white paper and black ink because it is a good way to deliver content. A 32bit book would have 4000 pages rather than 250. The reason it does not, has more to do with organizing that much content, which has more to do with the capability of the human brain to deal with information. which has a lot to do with why the 64bit operating system ads all talk about full motion graphics. (which aint text) Replacing 'del' with the trashcan icon is intuitive and works in many more languages. But it aint faster. And the set of icons users are confronted with now looks a lot like the ancient Chinese ideographs, and at the rate they are proliferating, will require the same steep learning curve that they were trying to avoid using icons in the first place. The ancient dos system of ANSI pulldowns used text on every line to describe what that choice did. This did require a different menu for every language, so I can see why the app developers wanted the GUI icons. But let's face it; there are enough users who know how to read English that they would be a large enough niche market for developers to see profit in servicing. So far, I dont see anything to replace text as a tool to deliver content any time soon; to be sure there's times when a picture is worth a thousand words, but there's also times when pictures wont get it across. In fact, as we see with election campaign video, the pictures are used to obfuscate. There's a reason the lawyers depend on text. And if what you are going to deliver is text, you do not need more than 16bit; the human brain simply can not deal with more complexity than that. Imagine a 32 bit alphabet of 16,000 characters. ;-} To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
