off topic - capatob - saratov2 computer Russsian pdp8

[Jon Elson]

On 01/06/2019 11:24 PM, Dave Wade via cctalk wrote:
>
> I am also pretty sure that prior to S/360 the term 
> "character" was generally used for non 8-bit character 
> machines. I am not familiar with the IBM 70xx series machines
The IBM 7070 (business machine) was a word-addressed 
machine, but all decimal.
The IBM 709x series (scientific machine) was also word 
addressed, but binary.


>   I seem to recall that some IBM machines also had 
> facilities to read all 9 bits from a 9-track tape as data 
> so 9-bit bytes but I can't find references. I also feel 
> the use of the term Octet was more marketing to distance 
> ones machines from IBM..... Dave 
The earlier machines were mostly using 7 track tape, not 9 
track. You did have your choice of even or odd parity.  I'm 
pretty sure that the 360 tape controls did not support any 
handling of the 9th track other than parity, and odd parity 
was the only option.

Jon