On 8/25/21 9:27 AM, Todd Goodman via cctalk wrote: > > Nope, the standard doesn't specify those bit sizes. > > Back in the 80s I was using the BBN C Machine with 10-bit bytes and > happily building from source I picked up on the newsgroups with little > issue >
Or, you could simply be bit-addressable, like the aforementioned STAR-100. This works to great advantage on vector machines, where control vectors are usually bit arrays. The downside is that when reading dumps, you had to do a lot of mental shifting to convert from addresses to indices. We had an SR-22 in the machine room to help out. There were many word-addressable machines also. A byte was whatever your shifting or masking made of it. The UNIVAC 1100 series was interesting in that a 36-bit word could be divided up by the hardware in 6, 9 or 12 bit parcels. --Chuck
