27 Mar
2016
27 Mar
'16
3:03 a.m.
Johnny Billquist scripsit:
SIXBIT dominated here for a long time. We see it both
in the PDP-8,
but also the PDP-6 and its follow ons. RAD50 was the natural
extension of SIXBIT on a machine that did not have a word size that
was a multiple of 6.
Well, for identifiers, yes. But SIXBIT was quite general, especially
if you repurposed two of the characters to mean "end of string" and
"CR+LF". The "@" was a popular choice for the former, perhaps
because
its encoding is 00; IIRC, "_" was popular for the latter.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
Long-short-short, long-short-short / Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs / (Masculine rhyme):
One sentence (two stanzas) / Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who / Don't have the time. --robison who's at texas dot
net