There was a discussion about a week ago about what floating point formats
were used in hand calculators. I ran into a description of the HP 45 calculator
on a website dedicated to HP calculators.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/

The following quote is from that site

     The HP calculator CPUs were optimized for floating point
     numbers. Each main register consisted of 14 of 4 bits each
     (56 bits per register) This allowed each register to hold a
     10 digit mantissa, a 2 digit exponent and signs for the mantissa
     and exponent. Each digit or sign occupied 4 bits. This is
     commonly referred to as Binary Coded Decimal (BCD)
     encoding.

Regards,

--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
http://bytecraft.com



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