🚀 go-pugleaf

>barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>
>}In article <HARKCOM.90Nov21080149@potato.pa.Yokogawa.Co.jp> harkcom@potato.pa.Yokogawa.Co.jp (Alton Harkcom) writes:
>}>   I never understood what the confusion was though. Are there systems
>}>which uses 16 bits/byte?

>BBN manufactures a processor that has twenty-bit words divided into two
>ten-bit bytes.   The box runs Unix, and it is quite an art writing a C
>program that is portable between the vanilla eight-bit world and this
>odd beasty.

Thats nothing: I spent my first two years at University doing Pascal
exercises on the Honywell Multics.  This used nine bit bytes and a
thirty six bit word.  Its epoch was 1900 and it counted microseconds
into a 72 bit unsigned int (this was in PL/1 which is like C but with
more type co-ercion facilities).

To fill up a few more lines, let me add that Multics also gave you
keyword access to records in files as part of the OS.  Pascal gave
records in files indexed by integer.  The compiler converted the index
integer to ascii so record 45 was accessed via key string "45".

Paul.


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Paul Johnson                               UUCP: <world>!mcvax!ukc!gec-mrc!paj
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