CYBER word length

[Robert Viduya]

>kim at amdahl.UUCP (Kim DeVaughn) (kim at amdahl.UUCP, <4169 at amdahl.UUCP>):
> In article <612 at astroatc.UUCP>, philm at astroatc.UUCP (Phil Mason) writes:
> >                       CDC thought that nobody would ever use more than 64
> > different symbols for I/O so they made their "byte" six bits long.
> And then they discovered that people would use more than 64 symbols, and
> had to come up with an escape kluge to get additional symbols.  So now
> CDC Display Codes can be either 6-bits or 12-bits in length.

This actually happened years ago.  Recently, they've decided to adopt the
ultimate kludge.  They've dropped all the 60-bit word and 6-bit character
nonsense and now are using 64-bit words and 8-bit bytes (not to mention
using the ASCII character set in their operating system :-).  Oh yeah,
their new architecture is also a twos-complement one.

				robert
-- 
Robert Viduya					     robert at pyr.ocs.gatech.edu
Office of Computing Services					(404) 894-4660
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia	30332