[TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 2 Feb 2021, Richard Salz wrote:

> BBN made a machine "optimized" for C.  It was used in the first 
> generation ARPAnet gateways.
> 
> A word was 10bits.  The amount of masking we had to do for some portable 
> software was unreal.

I'm trying to get my head around a 10-bit machine optimised for C... 
Well, if you accept that chars are 10 bits wide then there shouldn't be 
(much of) a problem; just forget about the concept of powers of 2, I 
guess.

Shades of the 60-bit CDC series, as handling strings was a bit of a 
bugger; at least the 12-bit PDP-8 was sort of manageable.

-- Dave