FTGH clear-out at Mesa Electronics, Richmond, CA, USA

Chuck Guzis cclist at sydex.com
Thu May 25 10:33:26 CDT 2017


On 05/25/2017 08:13 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
.
> 
> For some definition of "standard".  It seems that IBM did this, and DEC prior to the PDP-11, but other machines of that time or earlier numbered bits according to the power of 2 they represent, i.e., the "current standard".  CDC and Burroughs are examples.

Not all CDC machines did; consider the Cyber 200 series:

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/cyber/cyber_200/60256000_STAR-100hw_Dec75.pdf

But that only made sense, as the Cyber 200 machines are bit-addressable.
  For a time, my work straddled both the Cyber 70 and 200 systems, and
so had to adjust my thinking.  Not just bit-ordering, but the 70/6000
used 6-bit display code, while the 200 used 8 bit ASCII.

Fun times.

--Chuck



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