FWIW: the Telefunken TR4 indeed only supported half word addressing;
the half words being 24 bits; full words of 48 (plus some extra) bits
had even adresses,
which also were the addresses of the left halfword; the right halfword
had the address
of the left halfword plus one.
The TR 4 offspring TR 440 (which was ten times faster, a time sharing
machine)
supported COBOL and later Multics-PL/1; and then there was the need to
support
byte addressing, too. So some operations were added which worked
on so-called "Oktadenadressen", which were in fact halfword addresses
multiplied by 3 (you can imagine how the mapping of the byte addresses
to the
halfword addresses worked, very similar to the IBM/360). The Telefunken
TR 440
was developped from 1965 on and first delivered in 1969. So this was
indeed after
IBM/360; but IIRC, the byte addressing added to the TR 440 was not
inspired by the
360 machine - the COBOL compiler group asked for that.
I recently read some old documents about the German computer industry in
the 1960s.
The IBM/360 announcement apparently came like a shock to Telefunken, but
they
finally decided to keep direction, because some important customers
asked for a
system to replace the TR 4 machine, which had been quite successful.
And German government supported and funded the development.
About 50 TR 440 machines were built, and they worked until the mid 1980s
in Germany
(at universities). 20 Million Deutsche Marks for one machine :-)
It was no commercial success, but it motivated many people to enter the
computer business; it was much fun, after all :-)
I worked with the TR 440 at Stuttgart university from 1977 to 1981,
when I was a young student of computer science. The programming language
I used most was Pascal (and some Telefunken-ASSEMBLER).
From 1984 to 2001 ca.: Pascal/VS on IBM machines on VM/CMS :-)
Later 370-ASSEMBLER, PL/1 and C.
Today again: New Stanford Pascal - http://bernd-oppolzer.de/job9.htm
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 16.11.2020 um 09:28 schrieb Timothy Sipples:
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
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E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com
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