1 Sep
2006
1 Sep
'06
9:48 p.m.
I've always thought that 12-bit characters were
eminently practical.
Enough for many non-European alphabets--lots of elbow room. Of course,
that means that word length is not a power of 2, but then there have been
plenty of 12, 24, 36, 48 and 60 bit word length machines.
Practical for that application, but IBM figured out why 8 bits is such
a great unit - one can pack two BCD digits in a byte (before the web,
a huge amount of data was banking records), yet it is still really
handy for alpha characters. A 12 bit character would be innefficient
in the long run.
--
Will