[Tom Vaught]

Here is some info on the computer system I used in Computer Science Classes.

Digital Equipment Corporation DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family[1] manufactured beginning in 1966[2] and discontinued in 1983.[3][4][5][self-published source?] 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.[6]

The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the byte instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.

The PDP-10 is the machine that made time-sharing common, and this and other features made it a common fixture in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), ETH (ZIR), and Carnegie Mellon University. Its main operating systems, TOPS-10 and TENEX, were used to build out the early ARPANET.

We had a PDP-6 computer which was upgraded to the PDP-10 a few years later.
36 bit word length. That was a LONG time ago.

Tom V.