Yes and it wasn’t alone, I’ve programmed on several machines that didn’t have 8-bit organization. The DEC PDP-9 and some others had 18 bit words and the big CDC

Yes and it wasn’t alone, I’ve programmed on several machines that didn’t have 8-bit organization. The DEC PDP-9 and some others had 18 bit words and the big CDC 6600 series had 60 bit words with 10 chars per word, not exactly Unicode.