Extremely CISC instructions
Chuck Guzis
cclist at sydex.com
Wed Aug 25 11:45:50 CDT 2021
On 8/25/21 9:27 AM, Todd Goodman via cctalk wrote:
>
> Nope, the standard doesn't specify those bit sizes.
>
> Back in the 80s I was using the BBN C Machine with 10-bit bytes and
> happily building from source I picked up on the newsgroups with little
> issue
>
Or, you could simply be bit-addressable, like the aforementioned
STAR-100. This works to great advantage on vector machines, where
control vectors are usually bit arrays.
The downside is that when reading dumps, you had to do a lot of mental
shifting to convert from addresses to indices. We had an SR-22 in the
machine room to help out.
There were many word-addressable machines also. A byte was whatever
your shifting or masking made of it. The UNIVAC 1100 series was
interesting in that a 36-bit word could be divided up by the hardware in
6, 9 or 12 bit parcels.
--Chuck
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