"In 1969, Ken Thompson wrote the first UNIX system in assembly language on a PDP-7, then named Unics as a pun on Multics"
CDC "super" computers also had 60-bit words.
Moreover, the original ASCII standard had the 7-bit characters, the improvement over even less bits used for characters before that (6 bits == 2 octal digits). 8-bit bytes weren't something you could expect except when buying IBM (which had EBCDIC, not ASCII).
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7"In 1969, Ken Thompson wrote the first UNIX system in assembly language on a PDP-7, then named Unics as a pun on Multics"
CDC "super" computers also had 60-bit words.
Moreover, the original ASCII standard had the 7-bit characters, the improvement over even less bits used for characters before that (6 bits == 2 octal digits). 8-bit bytes weren't something you could expect except when buying IBM (which had EBCDIC, not ASCII).