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From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.arch
Subject: Re: *Why* do modern machines mostly have 8-bit bytes?
Message-ID: <6823@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-Jul-87 14:14:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.6823
Posted: Mon Jul 27 14:14:11 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Jul-87 04:47:59 EDT
References: <2807@phri.UUCP> <1085@rtech.UUCP> <6814@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 18
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.wizards:3442 comp.arch:1706

In article <6814@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) writes:
>
>The GE 225 series had a 22 bit word. This allowed for 3 ASCII characters
>and a flag bit. Since BASIC was developed on one of these machines, it's

Oops! My memory played me false. After looking at the hardware manuals
brought in by another old programmer, I recall that the 225 was actually
only 20 bits, three 6 bit characters (in a BCD like encoding) and two
flag bits. The communication processor was only 18 bits and DID function
in ASCII, doing the compression on the fly.

As an interesting side note, the two machines shared a disk, and the 225
memory was the same as the GE400 series, which was 24 bits wide.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {chinet | philabs | sesimo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me