The Honeywell Series 6000 boxes - taken from GE design, IIRC - had 36-bit addressable words, that could be interpreted as 6 6-bit BCD characters or 4 9-bit ASCII characters.
Decades ago, I wrote some GMAP (was that the assembler, or am I thinking of Prime Computer's PRIMOS assembler?) routines (under GCOS - [EMAIL PROTECTED] low bid community college contract, so no Multics) to display things like job name, SNUMB, remote destination node name, etc. and routines dealing with text characters had to be careful with character mode. My routine could be called from BCD programs (FORTRAN) and ASCII programs (COBOL), so I had to determine mode and use the right instructions to move the data from system blocks to the user-provided parameter area. It did have this interesting compiler on it, though - B. I wonder if Groupe Bull's machines still do this. Later, Ray ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
