11 Aug
2010
11 Aug
'10
6:55 p.m.
On 11 Aug 2010 at 18:35, Rich Alderson wrote:
What's odd about it? ASCII is a 7-bit code, and
if you have 36-bit
words at 5 characters per word you have a maximal use of memory.
(There was also a SIXBIT subset of ASCII which dropped the low 32 and
high 32 characters and packed 6 to a word, but it wasn't used for
general computing.)
So what does DECSystem 10 packed character data look like on 7 track
tape?
CDC used it on occasion--6 bit characters in a 60 bit word was much
easier to deal with than 7.5 8-bit characters or 8.571428571...
characters per word. 12 and 10 bit characters were also proposed as
well as using only the low-order 48 bits of a word. When the 7.5-per-
word was proposed, the author proposed a new term for 7.5 characters--
a "snaque" (get it? nibble, byte snaque...)
FIELDATA, now, *that's* odd. ;-)
No--RAD50 is odd.
--Chuck