El Camino Bignum

El Camino Bignum /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n.  The road
   mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco
   peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City
   and many portions of which are still intact.  Navigation on the San
   Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real,
   which defines {logical} north and south even though it isn't
   really north-south many places.  El Camino Real runs right past
   Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

   The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ol'/)
   means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'.  In the FORTRAN
   language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven
   significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger
   floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant
   digits (other languages have similar `real' types).

   When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a
   long road El Camino Real was.  Making a pun on `real', he started
   calling it `El Camino Double Precision' -- but when the hacker
   was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it
   `El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck.  (See {bignum}.)
   In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been
   reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.

   [GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was
   in fact him -- ESR]