Quick note that parity was never used in "characters stored". It was only ever used in transmission, and checked/removed by hardware[1]. [1] Yes, I remember yo

Quick note that parity was never used in "characters stored". It was only ever used in transmission, and checked/removed by hardware[1]. [1] Yes, I remember you could bit-bang a UART in software, but still the parity bit didn't escape the serial decoding routine.