Conversation

One thing I hadn't realized about computers with 6 or 7 bit bytes is that at least some of them were "alphanumeric" or "character oriented", which I think means that any numbers it used (except perhaps addresses) would appear in memory as a sequence of decimal digits. Which may explain #BASIC.

Then there's the #Burroughs #B2500 and #B3500, both of which operated exclusively in decimal including for addresses, were addressible down to the 4 bit digit, and could interpret an 8 bit byte as 2 4 bit BCD digits or as an ASCII or EBCDIC character. I assume there must have been different instructions for the different types.

I like the idea of having only a "character" data type. It must have made debugging and programming in machine language a lot easier.

#retrocomputing