The future of 32-bit support in the kernel

Re:The future of 32-bit support in the kernel by formerly_proven on Monday September 01, 2025 @04:52PM (#45096503)

Computers never used 7-bit bytes similarly to how 5-bit bytes were uncommon, but both 6-bit and 8-bit bytes were common in their respective eras.

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Re:The future of 32-bit support in the kernel by goku12 on Monday September 01, 2025 @11:30PM (#45098853)

I was asking about ASCII encoding and not the word size. But this information is also useful. So apparently, people were representing both numbers and script codes (EBCDIC in particular) in packed decimal or octal at times. The standardization on 8 bits and adoption of raw binary representation seems to have come later.

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Re:The future of 32-bit support in the kernel by formerly_proven on Tuesday September 02, 2025 @07:40AM (#45101736)

Because character encodings were primarily designed around transmission over serial lines.

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Re:The future of 32-bit support in the kernel by goku12 on Tuesday September 02, 2025 @01:36PM (#45106370)

Agreed. But how does that affect how encoding are designed? I mean packed decimal vs octal vs full binary, etc?

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