> Yeah, but there was a real issue, IIRC, about writing tapes- you had to write
> words, and, let's see, that's 5 7-bit ascii chars or 4 9-bit ascii chars that
> would get packed.....

It was only an issue when dealing with architectures that didn't have
enough bits.   I never heard of anybody using 9-bit bytes except for
when doing C compatibility.   Our C compiler actually supported 7-bit
bytes, sort of...   :')

			       _MelloN_