[net.arch] Why the C machine has 10 bit chars

perl@rdin.UUCP (Robert Perlberg) (08/13/83)

c
All I know about the BBN C machine is that they wanted to use
a basically 16-bit architecture but they didn't want to be restricted
to a 64K process size.  So they made it a 20 bit word machine
which makes its characters 10 bits each.

Robert Perlberg
New York
philabs!rdin!perl