ChenHo Encoding... In 1964
The mechanisms by which this was done vary. The example with which I am most familiar, relates to the Danish GIER computer from about 1960. In the GIER, the overflow bit...
Probably not, but a sentence in the article by Amdahl, Blaauw, and Brooks in the IBM Journal of Research and Development wherein the architecture of the IBM System-360 is discussed holds out that possibility...
Where they discuss the possible options for storing characters and decimal digits in the new architecture, the options were -
an 8-bit character, containing two 4-bit BCD digits;
a 6-bit character, containing one 4-bit BCD digit;
a 12-bit unit, containing either two 6-bit characters or three 4-bit BCD digits.
Some of us in high school in Southern California were doing this in the spring of...
The latter would have been nice, if they had *also* included 8-bit characters as an option as well, and as the 360 never addressed by bit the way the STRETCH did.
But they also say that "The 7-bit character, which incorporated a binary recoding of decimal digit pairs, was also briefly considered". Maybe it was only considered briefly because the binary recoding would have been digit 1 times 10, plus digit 2, in binary. But that something like Chen-Ho 7-bit encoding might have been thought of, and tossed away, at least almost seems like it could have happened...
John Savard
Looking for references to playing fightsongs on computers 4307
Alt Folklore Computers from Newsgroups