Re: evolution of bytes, The joy of FORTRAN

Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

According to Peter Flass  <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:

A lot of older machines were character-addressable. The term “byte” hadn’t
been invented yet. The 1401 (etc), 1620, and many 70xx machines.

 
Oh sure but I am fairly sure that the 360 was the first machine that
was both character and word addressable with the words at power-of-two
addresses, and a design that allowed word operationw to work as a unit
rather than serially by character.
 
As far as I know it was also the first character addressable binary
machine.  The earlier ones were decimal.

 
The contemporaneous B3500 was both digit and character addressable,
with characters on even address boundaries.   Like the 360, it had
an ASCII flag in the processor that controlled the value of the
zone digit during arithmetic operations on bytes.  Like the 360,
nobody used it and it was removed a couple generations later.
 

The flag was totally useless, especially since that’s all it did. All the
software and peripherals used EBCDIC.

--
Pete