At 5:20 AM 4/12/96, JonWienke@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 96-04-11 20:26:44 EDT, jeffb@sware.com writes:

...

[I told myself I was going to stay out of this, but Jim Bell's dogmatic stance irks me... ] Here's a citation from "Portability of C Programs and the Unix System" by S.C. Johnson and D.M. Ritchie (yes, that Richie) in the Bell System Technical Journal volume 57, Number 6, July-August 1978.

Citing sources from 1978 in the computing field is a little like using dictionaries from the 1800's to dictate modern English usage. My desktop ...

I've been ignoring most of these quibbles about the definition of "byte" and when it came about, etc., but the debate never seems to end. I went to the Jargon File (aka The Hacker's Dictionary), where a nice online version resides at http://beast.cc.emory.edu/Jargon30/JARGON.HTML This is what I found: byte : /bi:t/ [techspeak] n. A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word sizes. Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word `bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also nybble.