Any Significance to 65,536?
Excel has 65,536 rows, 256 columns, and a total of 16777216 cells in a spreadsheet.
Is there any significance to these numbers, or did Microsoft pick random limitations for a spreadsheet?
I left a comment on this post and David sent me an email inquiring, I didn’t know. Anybody?
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It’s a pretty significant computing number and I don’t understand most of it. However, it’s the upper 16 bits of a 32 bit number and is the largest value that can be handled by an openvms device driver (both from googlism.com).
Dick’s Blog has an interesting article on bitwise And that may shed a little light on this.
Mark
The bitwise post from Daily dose
Mat Matlock added this on David’s blog:
“The IV/256 goes back as far as Visicalc. I presume, since that is 2^8, that there is a memory allocation that fits here. 1-2-3, v 1A, had 2048 rows, again 2^11 (I think). Later versions of 1-2-3 expanded that number to 8192, then early versions of Excel went to 16384, still 2^??. I believe it was Excel ’97 that finally expanded it to 65536. More of that silly 2^??, which probably relates to some amount of memory being allocated to the address.”