In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 03/15/2006
at 07:05 AM, Paul Gilmartin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>I may well stand corrected on the device type. However I have a
>distinct memory of colleagues at one 7090 installation submitting
>jobs with the notation to the operator: "80 column data; do not read
>job online!" meaning that the operator must submit the job via the
>1401/1402 rather than the 7xx.
That notation only suggests that the 711 was limited to 72 columns.
Which, in fact, it was. It does *not* suggest that the card reader was
related to the 407.
>Agreed. Symptomatic of a very late design decision.
Why? The PDP-6 had byte handling instructions. It could deal with
7-bit bytes just as well as with 6-bit bytes. The decision to use one
or the other was strictly a matter of software.
>I conjecture they recognized the need for 7-bit ASCII too late to
>redesign the OS programming interface.
The PDP-6 was the PDP-6 and the OS was the OS. There was nothing in
the hardware design that constrained the OS to use a specific
character code or size.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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