7 Oct
2007
7 Oct
'07
1:57 a.m.
Subject: Re: these RTL or what?
From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:10:55 -0600
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
William Donzelli wrote:
SEVEN bit world. We can blame IBM for all our 8 bit PC ASCII stuff.
Eight bits I think for EBDC was earlier. Having 4 bit sized TTL stuff
does not make for nice octal digits. Ben.
Does it really makes that much differnce the number of bits for a char?
Really, Six bits was kinda tight for work where upper or lower case
was used but it didn't affect calculating Pi to a 100 places.
Wasn't the basic chunk 9 bits for PDP10 and it happened (DEC
software) used 6 bit char notation as a carry over from earlier
life with friden flexowriter and TTYs on earlier machines?
While It may have been an issue and part of the picture I don't
feel it was as heavy a weight as VAX was easier to promote and
potentially could address Gigabyte size memories with 32 bit
pointers rather than 256KW with a memory extension to 4MW.
I find it easier to see and recognize that bigger machines with
bigger memories for big programs crunching huge amounts of data
is what had a big part in the 10s demise.
Only opinion but hey, it's free.
Allison
Crunching
numbers was a part of the task. The other part was moving
and handeling data in mass storage and memory. Most of the DEC hardware
moved data pretty fast. What was the demise of PDP-10 was simple, megabytes.
And being six bit machine in an eight bit world...