On 2018-05-11, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Fri, 11 May 2018 21:55:17 +1200, Gregory Ewing wrote: > >> Hex came into vogue in the DEC world with the VAX, which was both >> byte-addressed and had a hex-oriented instruction encoding. > > > [...] You had computers with 6, 9, or even 60 bits per byte
Ah, the old CDC-6600 had 60-bit words. IIRC, the Pascal compiler used a 6-bit wide character set, which meant that you could fit 10 characters in a word, and Pascal identifiers were limited to 10 characters. > I'm also told that some of those computers didn't run Windows. Of course not, everything ran Linux back in the good old days. -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! PIZZA!! at gmail.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list