1 Sep
2006
1 Sep
'06
5:50 p.m.
On 9/2/2006 at 12:31 AM ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk wrote:
OK, most _modern-ish_ machines have a word length
that's a multiple of 4
bits. That's why hex is more popular than octal now, I guess.
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.
Trivia quiz: What piece of hardware (not IBM) for the 5150 and 5160 (i.e.
it was contemporary and 8 bit ISA) actually used 12-bit characters?
Cheers,
Chuck