On 29 Jun 2017, at 20:19, Peter da Silva wrote:
The DECsystem 10 guys also referred to the other subdivisions of their
36 bit words as bytes, sometimes, they could be 6, 7, 8, or 9 bits
long. I think they had special instructions for operating on them, but
they weren’t directly addressable.
A byte could be 1..36 bits long.
The special instructions used a data structure called a byte pointer
to reference the field within a word where the byte was to be placed
or retrieved. Four different formats of byte pointer existed, not
all
supporting the full range of possible byte sizes.
One of these days, when I really have too much free time, I must run
up a VM with the Panda TOPS-20 distro and find some examples of
interesting byte sizes which were actually used for something. 8-)
/Niall
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