Editing 36-bit computing (section)

{{Short description|Computer architecture bit width}}
{{refimprove|date=October 2009}}
{{N-bit|36|(six six-bit characters)}}
36-bit computers were popular in the early [[mainframe computer]] era from the 1950s through the early 1970s.

[[File:Friden calculator - Ridai Museum of Modern Science, Tokyo - DSC07579.JPG|thumb|300px|Friden mechanical calculator. The electronic computer word length of 36-bits was chosen, in part, to match its precision.]]

Starting in the 1960s, but especially the 1970s, the introduction of 7-bit [[ASCII]] and 8-bit [[EBCDIC]] led to the move to machines using [[8-bit computing|8-bit]] bytes, with word sizes that were multiples of 8, notably the [[32-bit computing|32-bit]] [[IBM System/360]] [[mainframe computer|mainframe]] and [[VAX|Digital Equipment VAX]] and [[Data General Eclipse MV/8000|Data General MV series]] [[superminicomputer]]s. By the mid-1970s the conversion was largely complete, and [[microprocessor]]s quickly moved from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit over a period of a decade. The number of 36-bit machines rapidly fell during this period, offered largely for [[backward compatibility]] purposes running [[legacy system|legacy programs]].