24 Nov
2009
24 Nov
'09
1:39 p.m.
I'd take that back perhaps another 10 years to
1973. It's a little
boring seeing systems with fixed power-of-two word lengths, 8-bit
characters and predictable instruction sets, all implemented with MOS
transistors.
I have a a few machines from the early 1980s with 20 bit word length (so
not a power of 2), variable instruciton set (the microcode is loaded from
disk at power-on), and the CPU is mostly made from bipolar ICs. OK, they
do use 8-bit characters.
-tony