At 11:36 AM 4/11/96 -0400, Blake Coverett wrote:

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At 06:29 PM 4/10/96 -0700, Simon Spero wrote:

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No, bytes are no always 8 bits - some machines use(d) 9-bit bytes.

I notice you gave no examples. Why is that?

Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com

In a past life I worked on a Honeywell DPS8 box that had 36 bit words and 9 bit bytes.

I'm seeing a few notes of this sort which make such claims, but there is not enough information included to establish that anybody _originally_ called those 9-bit data items "bytes" or not. It appears to me that after the fact, 20+ years later, there is a tendency to call ANYTHING other than a single bit a byte, at least during that time frame. What I'm looking for, however, is an indication that this was actually the term used, THEN, for that data structure.