Re: [MacPerl] Y2K complience (fwd)

[mark@cheers.jsc.nasa.gov (Mark Manning/Muniz Eng.)]

According to David T. McWherter:
> 
> The Macintosh - the ORIGINAL Macintosh, introduced in 1984, had
> a 32-bit 68000 processor.  All 68000 processors were 32-bit
> capable.  Regardless, it is quite possible to manipulate quantities
> bigger than the word size of the machine you're working on - it 
> just requires more instructions.  For instance, there are a lot
> of Quicktime structures that represent 64-bit quantities, despite
> the fact that no Mac has a 64-bit data integer word...
<snip>

To further expand upon this:

The original Macintoshes were 16 bit data path machines.
Meaning that it took two reads or two writes to move a 32
bit word around.  It wasn't until the Macintosh IIx (or
IIfx) that Apple went to a full 32bit databus.  Even then,
there were still parts of the Macs which were 16bit.
Ummmmmm....  The floppy drive controller was 16bit I
believe because it used an 8bit cpu chip to run the floppy
drives (an old Apple CPU if I remember correctly a 65816?
Guess I will have to open up the IIfx we have here in the
lab and check it out.).

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