byte alignment

[G.TOMASEVICH]

The description of the IBM STRETCH reminds me of the IBM 1620.  It represented
data as BCD characters (8, 4, 2, 1, flag, check bits).  Numbers had a flag
bit at one end to mark the field.  The arithmetic precision was continuously
variable up to the capacity of the memory.  I once set up memory to multiply
two 10000-digit numbers; it took about a second.
	George Tomasevich, AT&T Bell Laboratories