DEC Radix-50

DEC Radix-50

RADIX-50, commonly called Rad-50, RAD50 or DEC Squoze, is a character encoding created by Digital Equipment Corporation for use on their DECsystem, PDP, and VAX computers. RADIX-50's 40-character repertoire (050 in octal) can encode 6 characters plus 4 additional bits into one 36-bit word (PDP-6, PDP-10/DECsystem-10, DECSYSTEM-20); 3 characters plus 2 additional bits into one 18-bit word (PDP-9, PDP-15); or 3 characters in one 16-bit word (PDP-11, VAX).

The actual encoding differed between the 36-bit and 16-bit systems.