Re: questions about bits and bytes

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 12:00 AM 4/10/96 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>At 09:33 PM 4/8/96 -0400, Jack Mott wrote:
>>This may be a bit of a no brainer, but everything I have read sorta 
>>skips over this point.  a bit is 1 or 0.  8 bits make up a byte (0-255).
>
>Be careful writing code - sometimes a byte is -128 to 127 instead of 0 to 255.
>Also, there are machines (mostly old kinky ones) that use bytes of sizes
>other than 8 bits.

No, Bill, a "byte" has ALWAYS been 8-bits.  One of the main reasons 
the term "byte" was invented was because the term "word" (as in, "word 
length") varied for different computers, especially in the 1960's. (In fact, 
many computers of that era used word lengths other than 8, 16, 32, 64 bits, 
as surprising as this may sound to the current crop of PC and Mac 
afficionados.)  This made it inconvenient to talk about memory capacities 
unless you were referring to the same machine.  The solution was to invent a 
new term, "byte," which conviently had about the same size as an ASCII 
character and was always 8 bits.