[TUHS] 2^n-bit operands (Was reviving a bit of WWB)

[Lars Brinkhoff]

John Cowan wrote:
> On the 36-bit PDP-10, things were better: the sign bit was mostly ignored
> and five 7-bit ASCII characters were packed into each word, again with NUL
> padding.  (Line editors turned on the sign bit to indicate that this word
> held an explicit ASCII line number.)

It was not the sign bit but the least significant bit.  The ILDB/IDPB
byte instructions prefer it that way.