questions about bits and bytes
jim bell
jimbell at pacifier.com
Sat Apr 13 09:40:04 PDT 1996
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.
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