Re:Who's Using Ada? Real-World Projects Powered by the Ada P...
by ScottBurson on Thursday December 11, 2014 @05:53PM
(#8737518)
Okay, very good. I stand corrected. (Well, mostly. I would pedantically argue that you may have arbitrary-precision arithmetic, but you don't have arbitrary-precision integers until they're a functional datatype, so you can write simply 'a + b' to add them -- with the automatic allocation that that in general requires. But this is a quibble.)
So in the 50s they had integers with up to 2^9 - 1 (== 511) decimal digits.
In the 60s, the transistor-based one could do integers as big as your memory, the largest memory offered gave you up to 60K digits.