Charles Anthony wrote: > PDP-10: 36 bit word, 5*7bit characters. Mouse wrote: >> You mean like any 36-bit machine? > No, they usually either ran as 6 6-bit bytes or 4 9-bit bytes, from > what I understand.
As Charles wrote, the PDP-10 commonly uses 7-bit bytes for ASCII text, but that's only part of the truth. The architecture is quite byte size agnostic. There are instructions to operate on any byte size from 1 to 36 bits, at any position inside a word. (Well, a later extension to the architecture restricted this a bit.)