One fun fact I found the other day: ASCII is 7 bits, but when it was used with punch cards there was an 8th bit to make sure you didn't punch the wrong number of holes. https://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/info/ascii.html
Parity is for paper tape, not punched cards. Paper tape parity was never standardized. Nor was parity for 8-bit ASCII communications. Which is why there were devices with settings for EVEN, ODD, ZERO, and ONE for the 8th bit.
Punched cards have their very own encodings, only of historical interest.
I've only programmed in high level programming languages in 8-bit-byte machines. I can't understand what you mean by this sentence.
So in a 36-bit CPU a word is 36 bits. And a byte isn't a word. But what is a word and how does it differ from a byte?
If you asked me what 32-bit/64-bit means in a CPU, I'd say it's how large memory addresses can be. Is that true for 36-bit CPUs or does it mean something else? If it's something else, then that means 64-bit isn't the "word" of a 64-bit CPU, so what would the word be?
This is all very confusing.