Unix History: Why does hexdump default to word alignment?

[Omer Zak]

On Thu, 2011-12-01 at 12:51 +0200, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
> IIRC, all x86 processors
> provided BCD-related instructions (conversions to and from), but I
> think even then it was slower than straightforward binary arithmetic.
> It was slow because the machine instructions were for single bytes
> only, but not for wider objects. I do not remember if it was in any
> way related to 8087 math co-processors.

The 8086 had several instructions for adjusting results of arithmetic
operations to conform to BCD values.
The 8087 had the FBLD and FBSTP for loading and storing BCD values.

--- Omer


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