No, the 7030 was bit addressable. At the time of the S/360 announcement I thought that the decision to have a Model T "any byte size you want as long as it's 8" was a bad one, and I still think so. I also didn't like the 4 bit storage key and the 24 bit address. I thought that general registers might have been a good idea if there were 32, but that a maximum of base+index registers of 15 was too small.
What blindsided me was that IBM never supported the ASCII bit . -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Timothy Sipples <sipp...@sg.ibm.com> Sent: Monday, November 16, 2020 3:28 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Improve OMVS cp performance? Mike Schwab wrote: >You have to remember that S/360 was the first 8 bit computer. >[....] >Sorry. First computer to use 8 bits per character. I see others have cited the IBM 7030 and Telefunken TR 4 as examples of early computers that used (or at least were explicitly engineered to use) 8 bit character encoding. However, as far as I can tell both of those machines were word addressable machines, and their word sizes were different and much larger than their character sizes. Was there any pre-System/360 example of a computer that stored characters in 8 bits *and* offered 8 bit memory addressing? (Or 6 and 6, or 7 and 7?) For that matter, are there any still extant digital computer processors that (only) have word addressable memory and don't have 8 bit byte addressable memory? History evidently judges that particular System/360 design decision as wise or at least not unwise. - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
