9 Dec
2016
9 Dec
'16
10:43 a.m.
Rich Alderson wrote:
There are also Two-Word Global Byte Pointers (which
I've never seen
abbreviated) which carry the standard "any size byte at any position"
Maybe they were just Global Byte Pointers? OWG's were a late
addition. I was a member of the FORTRAN-10/20 v10 project to make it
generate/run code in extended addressing... It's tempting to look at
the compiler and FOROTS to see what terms we used a the time...
Neither of those is entirely accurate. 9-track tapes
on the PDP-10 used
one of the following encodings:
8-bit characters became more important near the end of PDP-10 software
development. ISTR TOPS-10 getting new 8-bit I/O modes, but I have a
vague recollection that translation between 36-bit words and mag tape
frames was handled by the "tape formatter" hardware, which means that
writing two words with 8 bit bytes in way that was easily legible on
8-bit byte oriented hardware ("high density mode" was only "legible"
for the even words).
phil