17 Jan
2017
17 Jan
'17
4:28 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 6:12 AM Joerg Schilling <schily(a)schily.net> wrote:
Note that the people wo did this, used the 18 bit machines before.
As steve johnson pointed out, just about everything around then was octal.
I think IBM brought widespread use of hex with the 360 ca. 1964, but to
most other vendors octal was a way of thinking as your interesting quote
points out.
As for character formats, on e.g. the pdp-10 you had lots of choice,
including 6 6-bit chars or 7 5-bit chars with one bit left over as common
... I also recall people used to complain about the inefficiencies inherent
in 8-bit character formats ...
I for one was still pretty glad to see octal mostly go away.
ron