these RTL or what?

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: these RTL or what?
>   From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
>   Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:10:55 -0600
>     To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>William Donzelli wrote:
>
>>> Crunching numbers was a part of the task.  The other part was moving
>>> and handeling data in mass storage and memory.  Most of the DEC hardware
>>> moved data pretty fast. What was the demise of PDP-10 was simple, megabytes.
>> 
>> And being six bit machine in an eight bit world...
>> 
>SEVEN bit world. We can blame IBM for all our 8 bit PC ASCII stuff.
>Eight bits I think for EBDC was earlier. Having 4 bit sized TTL stuff
>does not make for nice octal digits. Ben.

Does it really makes that much differnce the number of bits for a char?
Really, Six bits was kinda tight for work where upper or lower case
was used but it didn't affect calculating Pi to a 100 places.
Wasn't the basic chunk 9 bits for PDP10 and it happened (DEC 
software) used 6 bit char notation as a carry over from earlier 
life with friden flexowriter and TTYs on earlier machines?
While It may have been an issue and part of the picture I don't
feel it was as heavy a weight as VAX was easier to promote and
potentially could address Gigabyte size memories with 32 bit 
pointers rather than 256KW with a memory extension to 4MW.

I find it easier to see and recognize that bigger machines with 
bigger memories for big programs crunching huge amounts of data
is what had a big part in the 10s demise.  


Only opinion but hey, it's free.


Allison