Octal

[Chuck Guzis]

On 9/2/2006 at 12:31 AM ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk wrote:

>OK, most _modern-ish_ machines have a word length that's a multiple of 4 
>bits. That's why hex is more popular than octal now, I guess.

I've always thought that 12-bit characters were eminently practical.
Enough for many non-European alphabets--lots of elbow room.  Of course,
that means that word length is not a power of 2, but then there have been
plenty of 12, 24, 36, 48 and 60 bit word length machines.

Trivia quiz:  What piece of hardware (not IBM) for the 5150 and 5160 (i.e.
it was contemporary and 8 bit ISA) actually used 12-bit characters?

Cheers,
Chuck