Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > 9-track tapes on the PDP-10 used one of the following encodings:
>
> What about 7-track, any idea? I would assume 6 x 6-bit tape frames per
> 36-bit word, but that's just a guess.

A reasonable guess, and one I'd make too.  But I don't know either.

Supposedly, many ITS backups were made to 7-track tapes.  That became a
problem when the old tape drives started to fail, and available new tape
drives were only 9-track.