Mostly
PDP11GUI does not care, either 7b or 8b.
I'm kind of surprised to hear that; I
assumed that PDP11GUI can
download binaries, and for that, 8-bit is kind of necessary?
Depends on the protocol. While it's not a PDP-11, my own Dreamcast
serial-line code sends binaries over a serial line as hex. It doubles
the octet count sent (for the data - there's some other overhead too)
but requiring nothing beyond plain text of the comm channel. I'm sure
there are plenty of other serial-line protocols that encode more
compactly; if you use the 95 printable ASCII characters (space through
tilde), you can pack 32 bits of binary into 5 characters with less than
one bit of spare space; you can even reserve 10 characters for other
purposes (eg, framing) and still pack 32 bits of binary into 5
characters.
About the most compact packing I see is 32 binary octets into 39
base-95 values. In theory it's possible to do better, but not much,
and even this much is not convenient to do.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at
rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
