Yes and it wasn’t alone, I’ve programmed on several machines that didn’t have 8-bit organization. The DEC PDP-9 and some others had 18 bit words and the big CDC 6600 series had 60 bit words with 10 chars per word, not exactly Unicode.
It was a 36-bit machine that supported both 6 and 9-bit bytes, though since Multics was case sensitive (the first case-sensitive/lowercase OS I'd ever used) IIRC the sixbit mode was not used by Multics.
The most popular 36-bit hardware, the PDP-6/PDP-10/DEC-20 family, supported addressable bytes from 1-63 bits in width. Doesn't it seem odd that C defaults to octal? Because of the legacy of earlier machines on which octal was more natural, C & Unix picked it up too, despite being developed on the PDP-7 and later PDP-11.
I think the 8-but byte might have started out as an IBMism.
It makes a lot of sense if you write octal instead of hexadecimal.
> ON MOST LARGE SCALE HONEYWELL EQUIPMENT, A BYTE EQUALS 9 BITS
Wait, 9 bits?