18 May
2020
18 May
'20
3:13 p.m.
On May 17, 2020, at 09:24, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
... The PDP-10 addressed memory in 36-bit units. The character manipulating
instructions could deal with a variety of different byte lengths: you could
store ... five ASCII 7-bit characters (with a bit left over) ...
IIRC, this format was called 5/7 IOPS ASCII. The PDP-7, 9, and 15 computers used
a variant of this format, but they had to start with a pair of (18-bit) words.
Around 1970, I wrote a pair of (assembly language) routines to extract and insert
characters, because our PDP-15 did NOT have character manipulating instructions.
-r