Mike Schwab wrote: >You have to remember that S/360 was the first 8 bit computer. >[....] >Sorry. First computer to use 8 bits per character.
I see others have cited the IBM 7030 and Telefunken TR 4 as examples of early computers that used (or at least were explicitly engineered to use) 8 bit character encoding. However, as far as I can tell both of those machines were word addressable machines, and their word sizes were different and much larger than their character sizes. Was there any pre-System/360 example of a computer that stored characters in 8 bits *and* offered 8 bit memory addressing? (Or 6 and 6, or 7 and 7?) For that matter, are there any still extant digital computer processors that (only) have word addressable memory and don't have 8 bit byte addressable memory? History evidently judges that particular System/360 design decision as wise or at least not unwise. - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
