@cross @soaproot @b0rk #UNIVAC 1100 running EXEC-8 used six #FIELDATA characters per 36-bit word, or four 9-bit #ASCII characters, and you can be assured that EXEC-8 programmers also used those “extra” bits in each character for other stuff.

That encoding offered app developers one or two flag or control bits per character, as ASCII fits in 7 bits. 8-bit ASCII with CSI and friends is less than ubiquitous to this day.

Some #DEC #RAD50 6-bit code is still latent in 64-bit VSI #OpenVMS to this day, and probably including within the x86-64 port. Last time I met that RAD50 was deep inside the OpenVMS file system code.