On 02/27/11 5:32 AM, Always Learning wrote: > On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote: > >> Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember >> "byte" being a synonym for "bit field" and a byte could be any number of >> bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit >> bytes were quite common on such machines. > PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to > Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which > could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters. the PDP-10 was in fact considered a mainframe in the 1960s. They were more commonly called DECsystem-10, or KA10, KL10. the CPU was multiple cabinets, the KL10 supported up to 4 megawords of ram (where a word was 36 bits). They were commonly used as timesharing systems which was relatively uncommon in the late 1960s