how to convert 3 byte to float

[jdsahr at gmail.com]

On Dec 8, 6:05 am, "Mario M. Mueller" <news.muel... at arcor.de> wrote:
> Tommy Nordgren wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > One thing to consider: It is possible that one of the bytes
> > contributes bits to BOTH the mantissa and the exponent ;
>
> From todays point of view I cannot exclude this.
>
> > Do you know the relative
> > accurazy of the digitizer?
>
> Not yet. It's seismic data, that implies:
>
> - values will be positive and negative
> - value range should cover several orders of magnitude
>
> Mario

What a strange thread.

However, I have had experience with a computer that had 3-byte words.

The Harris "H" series running VULCAN and VOS (yup) had three byte
words.

As I recall, the single-precision floats used two words, and ignored
two of the bytes.  The double precision floats used all six bytes.
There was also a 12 byte quad precision (which is sort of
impressive).

However, ... are you *sure* that the digitizer was floating point?
There are a few "floating point" ADCs out there today, but not very
many, and I'd be amazed if there was a 20 year old one that was part
of a seismic instrument.  A 12 bit ADC has over 60 dB of dynamic range
(in power) even with int encoding.