Re: byte me, The joy of FORTRAN

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

These days we think that all bytes are 8 bits but in that era 6 or 7 or 9 were
all common. I don't ever recall writing code on a PDP-10 that used 8 bit bytes
other than maybe unpacking magtapes from IBM systems.

 
Multics used 8-bit bytes on a 36-bit Honeywell 6000. The developers tried
to discourage the use of 9-bit bytes - I was told that “nothing” used them,
but I found out WordPerfect used them for metacharacters.

 
That's odd. I am reasonably sure that the 635 only had hardware
support for 6 and 9 bit bytes and I don't think the 645 or 6000
changed that. I suppose it could have been a software convention,
don't put anything in the high bit of a 9 bit byte or you'll be sorry.