please help to uninstall FreeBSD!!!

[Heiner Strauß]

Am Mittwoch, den 19.08.2009, 07:59 +0000 schrieb
freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 01:45:27PM -0400, Karl Vogel wrote:
> 
> > >> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:23:29 -0700, 
> > >> Walt Pawley <walt at wump.org> said:
> > 
> > W> As speculation on my part, perhaps the six character limitation
> is less
> > W> a software issue than an early architecture issue - DEC's
> PDP-6/10
> > W> design used 36-bit words and packed six characters (clearly from
> a
> > W> limited subset of the then current ASCII) per word, making simple
> > W> searches very effective through symbol tables with a simple word
> level
> > W> compare loop.
> > 
> >    I'll second that.  My first job for Uncle Sugar was on a DEC
> 10/55
> >    for the Air Force, and 36-bit words were a fact of life.  There
> were
> >    lots of programs around for conversion to/from 32-bit words, just
> so
> >    we could talk to everybody else on Earth.
> 
> CDC (Control Data) mainframe machines used 6 bit characters.
> I believe the 3600 series had 36 bit words.
> The 6000 series (6400, 6500, etc, plus 170/750) used 60 bit words
> but still used 6 bit characters.  So, everything was all upper case.
> It had 12 bit 'peripheral processors' which tended the 60 bit main 
> processor[s] so later started to use 12 bit characters or sometimes 8 
> in 12 to allow for upper/lower case.   That was a Seymour Cray thing.
> He designed their early mainframes before he bolted to make his
> own companies (so he wouldn't have to conform to corporate control).

And I always thought it was 14 bit with 7 bit characters, perhaps this
is why my outputs looked strange :) This was the last model I've used:

http://www.cray-cyber.org/systems/cy960.php

> Later CDC came out with their 180 series that used 64 bit words
> and 8 bit bytes. It was kind of a nice system but it was too late for 
> them.  The world was turning to clusters of cheap CPU chips running
> UNIX
> instead of massive mainframes running proprietary OSen and CDC didn't 
> jump on that bandwagon soon or strongly or cheaply enough.
> 
> Anyway, in those earliest of days, 6 bits was the economical character
> set.  But it was an obstacle to upper/lower case characters without
> using some shift code.   IBM and DEC started doing 8 bit bytes - I
> don't 
> know just when - and that allowed eash use of upper/lower characters
> and
> so quickly determined the standard character size for a long time.

Didn't need lower case at this time. REAL PROGRAMMERS USED FORTRAN

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

The problem was, the programmers packed the string into integer arrays.
2 characters in 1 integer saved a lot of space, but the VAX didn't like
this style.

>   Now 
> that 8 bit byte is a thorn in the side of those who want to create
> and 
> universalize a character set that is international.  
> 
> ////jerry
> 

Wasn't it just 3 or 4 releases ago FreeBSD went 8 bit clean ?