On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 14:07, Paul Koning wrote:
>>>> "William" == William Donzelli <aw288(a)osfn.org> writes:
> Not in this community! Newfangled usage,
yes.
William> Well, if newfangled means after 7 April 1964.
Is that when IBM did the 360?
But at that time they were merely one of the users of the term "byte",
and arguably the odd man out by applying it to 8 bits rather than the
more common 6.
I've seen references to 'byte' meaning lots of numbers 6 - 9, but was it
ever really weighted towards 6? Most references I've seen to the
6-bit-unit was simply, 'character'. But I spent no time around IBM
(except one brief stint on TSO onna 360 writing 8x300 code).
Or perhaps not yet. There are still machines in
production use where
byte does not mean 8 bits. Cyber mainframes, for example.
What's a cyber byte size?