0435. What will be the range of the characteristic of the exponent given the traditional 7-bits allocated to it? What does this mean?

Since 2⁷ = 128, we can have 128 different values associated with the characteristic. However, the characteristic can take-on both negative and non-negative values, the range would be:

-2⁶ to +2⁶ – 1 or -64 to 63

This means that we can move the decimal place 63 positions to the right, or 64 positions to the right. In other words, the we could represent such numbers as:

0.123E63 =

123000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

or

0.123E-64 =

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000123