>> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:23:29 -0700, >> Walt Pawley <w...@wump.org> said:
W> As speculation on my part, perhaps the six character limitation is less W> a software issue than an early architecture issue - DEC's PDP-6/10 W> design used 36-bit words and packed six characters (clearly from a W> limited subset of the then current ASCII) per word, making simple W> searches very effective through symbol tables with a simple word level W> compare loop. I'll second that. My first job for Uncle Sugar was on a DEC 10/55 for the Air Force, and 36-bit words were a fact of life. There were lots of programs around for conversion to/from 32-bit words, just so we could talk to everybody else on Earth. -- Karl Vogel I don't speak for the USAF or my company Men are liars. We'll lie about lying if we have to. I'm an algebra liar. I figure two good lies make a positive. --Tim Allen _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
