Timeline for What was the rationale behind 36 bit computer architectures?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 27, 2019 at 1:09 | comment | added | cjs | I suspect in many cases octal was used for 8- and 16-bit byte/word sizes because octal had already been used extensively in previous machines (where it made more sense) and both existing knowedge and existing code (e.g., when building, e.g., cross-assemblers or porting other tools) could be re-used. DEC had spent more than ten years producing various 18-, 12- and 36-bit machines by the time they released the PDP-11. | |
| Jul 26, 2019 at 17:40 | comment | added | jefuf | I also occasionally saw 8- and 16-bit words represented in octal. Lot more octal than hex in those days. | |
| Jul 26, 2019 at 17:19 | comment | added | dave | In my experience of two very different machines, octal was used for 8-bit quantities. PDP-11 (16 bit word/8 bit byte). KDF9 (48-bit word/8 bit syllable, "syllabic octal" used when writing a word as six syllables). | |
| Jul 26, 2019 at 17:11 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | IMO the turning point was IBM's choice of an 8-bit byte for the System/360, which (along with its successors) became the dominant mainframe computers for the next 30 years. | |
| Jul 26, 2019 at 16:16 | history | edited | jefuf | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 168 characters in body
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| Jul 26, 2019 at 16:10 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 26, 2019 at 16:36 | |||||
| Jul 26, 2019 at 16:06 | history | answered | jefuf | CC BY-SA 4.0 |