DEC Radix-50 - 16-bit Systems

16-bit Systems

Some strings in DEC's 16-bit systems were encoded as 8-bit bytes, others used Radix-50. In Radix-50, strings were encoded in successive words as needed, and the first character within each word is in the most significant position. For example, using the PDP-11 encoding, the string "ABCDEF", with character values 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, would be encoded as a word containing the value (1*40 + 2) * 40 + 3 = 1683 followed by a word containing the value (4*40 + 5) * 40 + 6 = 6606. Thus, 16-bit encoded values range from 0 (three spaces) to 63999 ("999"). When there are fewer characters in a word than it can hold, the string is padded with trailing spaces.

There were several minor variations of the encoding families. For example, the RT-11 operating system considered the character corresponding to value 011101 to be undefined, and some utility programs used that value to represent * instead.

The use of Rad-50 was the source of the filename size conventions used by the PDP-11 operating systems. Using Rad-50 encoding, six characters of filename could be stored in two sixteen-bit words while three more characters of extension (filetype) could be stored in a third sixteen-bit word. The period that separated the filename and extension was implied (not stored and always assumed to be present). Rad-50 was also commonly used in the symbol tables of the various PDP-11 programming languages.