Ten Year Rule

[Tony Duell]

> I'd take that back perhaps another 10 years to 1973.  It's a little 
> boring seeing systems with fixed power-of-two word lengths, 8-bit 
> characters and predictable instruction sets, all implemented with MOS 
> transistors.

I have a a few machines from the early 1980s with 20 bit word length (so 
not a power of 2), variable instruciton set (the microcode is loaded from 
disk at power-on), and the CPU is mostly made from bipolar ICs. OK, they 
do use 8-bit characters.

-tony