oboy, if we keep at it, we'll re-discover the rationale for FTP having
separate BINARY and IMAGE modes.

>There were a number of ways to pack the bytes into the 36-bit word.

5 7-bit US-ASCII + one spare, four nine-bit chars for tape, ....

Targeting a 32-bit word-addressible machine would finesse all these
nasty issues, yet give good insight into life with two sizes of
pointers (word pointers for word-aligned addressees, two-word pointers
for "byte" or void* pointers).  GCC doesn't really want to go there.


>There were some programs that even did 6 6-bit bytes.  A weird vestage
>of that survived as radix-20 in the pdp-11 OSes for on disk storage.


Radix-50, no?