48-bit floating point

Norsk Data 48-bit single precision format: Exponent has a bias of +256. (Subtract 256 to get true exponent)

Special values for exponent:

Mantissa has an implicit 33th bit of 1 (unless mantissa is 0). This is the 0.5 bit, i.e. mantissa is normalised to be 0.5 < mantissa < 1.0

Decimal point is thus to the left of the implicit 33th bit.

The 48-bit floating point format is only used by the 16-bit ND computers, the 32-bit computers used the 32-bit format as its single precision format.