28 Jun
2013
28 Jun
'13
10:04 a.m.
On 06/28/2013 09:21 AM, ben wrote:
The point I was making was that 9 bit bytes are a
better word size for
bytes. The PDP 11 went 8 bits and that we know in hindsight is just too
small.
Remember that a common way of storing character data in a PDP-10 was 5
7-bit characters with a bit left over in each word. In point of fact,
when the PDP-10 was introduced, there were still a fair number of
systems using 6-bit bytes. But that was largely an artificial
distinction--most were not byte-addressable, but word-addressable.
I recall that an argument of the time was that having
byte-addressability was just silly--a fast machine with a large word
size and word address granularity could be just as fast as a machine
that used hardware to handle byte-addressability.
I don't think the question was ever settled completely.
--Chuck