6 Jan
2019
6 Jan
'19
11:08 a.m.
On 1/6/19 11:25 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr via cctalk wrote:
I think it?s also telling that the IETF uses the term
octet in all of
the specifications to refer to 8-bit sized data. As ?byte? (from
older machines) could be anything and is thus somewhat ambiguous.
It *may* have been the IBM 360 that started the trend of Byte == 8-bits
as the 360?s memory (in IBM?s terms) was byte addressable and the
instructions for accessing them were ?byte? instructions (as opposed
to half-word and word instructions).
Thank you for the clarification.
My take away is that before some nebulous point in time (circa IBM's
360) a "byte" could be a number of different bits, depending on the
computer being discussed. Conversely, after said nebulous point in time
a byte was standardized on 8-bits.
Is that fair and accurate enough? - I'm wanting to validate the patch
before I apply it to my mental model of things. ;-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die