So Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet, eh? (fwd)

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

The 12 bit word was not suitable for a modern word processor, however, the 
8 did support the full USASCII charater set. It would pack 3 bytes into 2 
12 bit words. I wrote a device driver for a Potter printer where we had to 
unpack the the triplet and send 6 bit character pairs to the printer, which 
took 2 6 bit characters per word.
Additionally, I was one of the programmers on the Burger King POS. We had 
to develop our own communication routines. Then on the mainframe side we 
had to essentially reconstruct the byte stream into a PDP-8 mempry map 
because all of our data was stored in 12 or 24 bit integers on the 8.

But, the PDP-8 was the original RISC mechine :-)
"Mark J. Dulcey" wrote:

> The PDP-8 would not have been a good choice for a word processor 
> for a couple of reasons. First, most of them didn't have any 
> high-quality output devices attached to them, just Teletype 
> terminals or perhaps a line printer. Second, the native character 
> set of the system was a 6-bit one (the better to fit in the 
> 12-bit words), which could only handle upper-case letters and a 
> limited set of punctuation.
> 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org


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