Yes, of course the collection was Computer _Structures_ (The follow-on
edition to Bell& Newell's collection of classic papers).  Dunno why my
fingers mistyped that; probably thinking of Hennessy and Patterson's
text.

If anyone is serious about porting to a non-byte-addressible machine,
the DG Eclipse series would be a more available and marginally saner
target.

Mike Meissner [*?] once posted several informative anecdotes about
the issues with porting GCC to a non-byte-addressed architecture, the
void*/char* vs other-things pointers, networking stacks, usw.
Suffice to say that the issues, both for compiler and code, are nontrivial. 


[*] I hope I remember the right name; someone with considerable
experience implementing C on those machines, and porting DG/UX; and
with GCC backends.


[**] Yes, the BBN paging unit was early.  Saying 'Twenex' is a really,
really good way to make oldtime Digits/TOPS-20 users wince. :)