22 Sep
2004
22 Sep
'04
7:41 a.m.
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
I always thought that the technical definition of a "byte" is
"8-bits".
--
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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.