The CDC Cyber series had many different character sets, which was a major pain in the ass for anyone maintaining software for them. I spent several years working on the Pascal compiler for the CDC machines (the orignal implementation from ETH). The initial character sets had 63 characters with 0 reserved for end of line. Later they moved to 64 characters, with zero being :. The made the end of line (remember this was the days of punched cards and line printers) marker very complicated. It was two or more zero characters that appeared at the end of a word (60 bit words, 10 characters per word). End of line testing was a real pain. Later they switched to a mixed 6 bit / 12 bit character scheme that made life even more complex. Determining the length of a string (in characters) involved interpreting each character in the string, you couldn't simply look at the amount of memory used. I spent many pleasant (and not so pleasant at times) years doing systems programming on those machines. The real scary thing is I still remember details of it, even after 25 years.

If I remember correctly the compiler was never modified to handle lower case letters, but I think the run-time support could handle them. I worked on the run-time part of the system, and I recall dealing with the various characters sets. I also put in the ability to call PPU programs from Pacal programs. This could also be done directly in Pascal, but required a fair amount of knowldege and several compiler cheats, so it wasn't recommended (which is why I did it that way most of the time). The CDC machines were the first ones that I used that had real parallelism, learned a hell of a lot the hard way! The 6-7-8 was an end or record, and 6-7-8-9 was and end of information. I seem to recall that on some devices (tape and cards??) two end of records in a row generated an end of information. A number of mini's were used as batch input systems on the CDC's. It was fairly easy to produce software for this, the protocol was available from CDC. We produced a version that would run on an HP2100, so something as modern as an 11/34 would have no problem with it. One of the interesting things about the CDC machines, is that the PPU programs didn't change from one version of the operation system to another. I can still recall looking at PPU program listings that had the following comment at the start: Translated to assembler from the original binary entered by Seymour Cray. I heard a story that the first operating system for the 6000 series machines was written in several weeks in Seymour Cray's cottage by a small group of programmers.