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Did any computer use a 7-bit byte?

Retrocomputing Asked on August 25, 2021

In an answer to Why did IBM System 360 have byte addressable RAM I wrote regarding the choice of byte size:

7 bits would be a perfect match for ASCII, but engineers would instinctively recoil from basing the word sizes on a prime number.

(Okay, someone else pointed out that EBCDIC actually uses 8 bits, but that would only be a concern for IBM in particular.)

Now it occurs to me to wonder, did anyone ever build a computer with a 7 bit byte? Or with a 14, 28 or 56-bit word?

7 Answers

The PDP-10 had 'byte instructions' that could process a sequence of bytes of size 1 to 36 bits. The byte pointer was a word containing an 18-bit word address (and the usual index/indirect indications) plus position and size of the byte within the word.

It was common to use 7-bit byte sequences for ASCII text, which gave 5 characters per word and one (usually) unused bit.

There were monitor calls (system calls) that accepted strings of 7-bit characters packed in this way.

So: at the hardware level, bytes were variable-sized. At the software convention level, a byte was frequently 7 bits.

See section 2.3 in the KA-10 system reference manual.

Correct answer by another-dave on August 25, 2021

The well-known IBM 1401 technically had a 7-bit byte (plus parity). It was designed around the common format of IBM punched cards, which it was designed to process; these had ten "digit" rows and two "zone" rows, of which one digit and optionally one zone (for which the zero row also counted as a third zone) could be punched simultaneously in each column.

This essentially meant that each column of a card contained a value that could be encoded in 6 bits - 4 representing a BCD digit, and two more indicating the zone (no zone, first zone, second zone, or zero row). To this, the 1401 added a "word mark" bit for internal use, for a total of 7 bits.

Answered by Chromatix on August 25, 2021

The second-generation Soviet computer Minsk-32 (the series size is 2889 machines, 1968-75, civilian use, one of the rare early mainframes noted for use in Antarctica) used a 37-bit word and 7-bit representation of alphanumeric characters (5 in a word). Yes, the concept of "bytes" is difficult to apply to a similar old computer (which continued the line of vacuum tube machines), but special commands for the convenience of operations with 7-bit blocks took place in the command architecture.

Answered by Wheelmagister on August 25, 2021

The ADAU1701 is a 28-/56-bit DSP for audio processing. CHAR_BIT is probably 28 on that platform like most odd-sized DSPs but I'm not quite sure since I couldn't find its programming manual

Answered by phuclv on August 25, 2021

Yes; there have been several (although, to my knowledge, none in the most simple sense where seven binary bits are treated strictly as as a base-7 system of Peano-like numbers). Instead, they are systems in which at least one (typically, two or three) carry are treated as separate state-modification bits.

The most oldest/most simple example (although it may not meet the definition of a Turing-complete computer) is the ancient 5/2 abacus.

More recent examples generally are cases where some form of binary-coded decimal is used, particularly those that use Chen-Ho encoding (which fit a better conception of the system being "7-bit", as Boolean logic/operations can still be (relatively) easily applied, as opposed to more packed (or packed/padded) 7-bit numbers, which require a variable number of instructions to ascertain certain binary/two's complement values.

Of these, the "two of seven" approach is most common. Examples: the IBM 650, the FACOM 128, and the "IBM 370 compatibility feature" (hardware emulation) built in to the IBM 7070/7074.

Answered by Geoff Nixon on August 25, 2021

The VT52 text terminal certainly doesn't qualify as a full computer, but it does have a processor running software out of a ROM. The RAM holding the displayed text is 2048 7-bit bytes. The character generator ROM is also 7 bits wide.

Answered by Lars Brinkhoff on August 25, 2021

The Norsk Data ND-505 had a 28-bit address bus.

Answered by snips-n-snails on August 25, 2021

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