22 Sep
2004
22 Sep
'04
8 a.m.
>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage
Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> writes:
Vintage> On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
> > If > you hold the word width constant,
yes, you are right. But
> that is not > what I was talking about. In many early computers,
> the data buss and > the word width were the same.
>
> ... and many did not. The 'byte' as a convention for talking about
> memory is just that, a convention, and fails miserably on machines
> whose major casual metric is not a multiple of 8 bits. Many, many
> machines were built on a multiple of 6 bits because that's how
> many it took to define a character.
Vintage> I always thought that the technical definition of a "byte"
Vintage> is "8-bits".
Not in this community! Newfangled usage, yes. If you want a word for
8-bit chunk, nothing smaller, nothing larger, say "octet". (That
makes you sound like a network geek, admittedly -- it's where the term
originated, I believe.)
paul