On 03/15/12 1:20 PM, Jerry McAllister wrote: > But, on the 7 track, it used a 6 bit character set that excluded > lower case, eg was only upper case alpha, decimal digits and special > characters. I don't remember how binary was encoded on them, > probably pairs of 6 bit 'bytes' since the PPs were 12 bit 'machine'.
now that I think about it, the BCD I remember *was* a 6 bit code, with just the core 64 characters. and the CDC machines I remember were 30/60 bit word sizes and the PPs were 12 bit... machines like the CDC 6600. so the 6 bit character code fed nicely into 7 track tape (6 bits plus parity). yes, this was 1960s hardware, still in use in the early/mid 70s, IIRC, that 6600 was largely used to support a 7600. anyways. ancient history. i'd have said 'been there, done that, got the t-shirt', except I wore those t-shirts out 30 years ago. -- john r pierce N 37, W 122 santa cruz ca mid-left coast _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos