questions about bits and bytes

[jim bell]

At 11:36 AM 4/11/96 -0400, Blake Coverett wrote:
>> At 06:29 PM 4/10/96 -0700, Simon Spero wrote:
>> >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 at 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.