3 Feb
2021
3 Feb
'21
9:51 p.m.
John Cowan wrote:
On the 36-bit PDP-10, things were better: the sign bit
was mostly ignored
and five 7-bit ASCII characters were packed into each word, again with NUL
padding. (Line editors turned on the sign bit to indicate that this word
held an explicit ASCII line number.)
It was not the sign bit but the least significant bit. The ILDB/IDPB
byte instructions prefer it that way.