off topic - capatob - saratov2 computer Russsian pdp8

Bob Smith bobsmithofd at gmail.com
Sun Jan 6 13:34:13 CST 2019


With the advent of wide spread introduction of 16 bit machines the
definition of a byte as an 8 bit unit was accepted because ASCII
supported character sets for multiple languages, before the 8bit
standard there were 6 bit, 7 bit variations of he character sets.
Gee, what were teletypes, like the model 15, 19, 28, oh yeah 5 level
or 5 bit..with no parity.

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 2:29 PM Bob Smith <bobsmithofd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry, thanks for playing but
> Actually half of a WORD is a BYTE, whatever the numerical length is.
> Ready for this,half of a BYTE is a NIBBLE. In fact, in common usage,
> word has become synonymous with 16 bits, much like byte has with 8
> bits.
> What's the difference between a word and byte? - Stack Overflow
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/.../whats-the-difference-between-a-word-and-byte
> Feedback
> About this result
>
> On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 1:48 PM Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 2019-01-06 at 12:00 -0600, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
> > > Re: off topic - capatob - saratov2 computer Russsian pdp8
> >
> > Nothing has changed as regards the number of bits in a byte, a nybble
> > is 4 bits, 8 to the byte, and x to the word - this last varies widely
> > depending on architecture.
> >
> > Still, in Spirit, on an octal processor a whole number is a six bit
> > 'byte', so the term is appropriate, especially to avoid confusion with
> > the word size of two six bit 'bytes'.
> >
> > Fun.
> >
> > Jeff
> >


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