Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote: >On 2013-06-03, Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> When I was a Freshman in college, I used a CDC Cyber a lot; it had 6 bit >> bytes and 60 bit words. This was in 1985. > >But you couldn't address individual 6-bit "hextets" in memory could >you? My recollection is that incrementing a memory address got you >the next 60-bit chunk -- that means that by the older terminology a >"byte" was 60 bits. A "character" was 6 bits, and a single register >or memory location could hold 6 characters.
A single machine word was 60 bits, so a single register read got you 10 characters. There were three sets of registers -- the X registers were 60 bits, the A and B registers were 18 bits, which was the size of the largest possible address. CDC didn't actually use the term "byte". That was IBM's domain. When ASCII became unavoidable, most programs changed to using 5x 12-bit "bytes" per word. Ah, memories. I spent 10 years working for Control Data. -- Tim Roberts, t...@probo.com Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
