Early in my employment I worked on two classic #computers that we would now classify as RISC machines - the PDP-8/E and the Nova 2. The PDP-8 was a 12-bit machine with 8 opcodes and the Nova 2 was 16-bit machine with essentially 8 I/O, 8 arithmetic/logical, 6 memory reference and 7 CPU control instructions. Early Nova computers read from 8-channel paper tape (2 frames per word) with longitudinal parity. Magnetic tape was only 7-channel with horizontal parity, and it was deemed impossible to 1/3