>> Mostly PDP11GUI does not care, either 7b or 8b. > I'm kind of surprised to hear that; I assumed that PDP11GUI can > download binaries, and for that, 8-bit is kind of necessary?
Depends on the protocol. While it's not a PDP-11, my own Dreamcast serial-line code sends binaries over a serial line as hex. It doubles the octet count sent (for the data - there's some other overhead too) but requiring nothing beyond plain text of the comm channel. I'm sure there are plenty of other serial-line protocols that encode more compactly; if you use the 95 printable ASCII characters (space through tilde), you can pack 32 bits of binary into 5 characters with less than one bit of spare space; you can even reserve 10 characters for other purposes (eg, framing) and still pack 32 bits of binary into 5 characters. About the most compact packing I see is 32 binary octets into 39 base-95 values. In theory it's possible to do better, but not much, and even this much is not convenient to do. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
