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Re: questions about bits and bytes
jim bell writes:
: >At 09:33 PM 4/8/96 -0400, Jack Mott wrote:
: . . . .
: >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.
One trouble with this statement was that an ASCII character only has 7
bits. Another is that when I snuck into the IBM Executive Computer
Concepts Course in the mid-sixties, we [a bunch of high-powered
executives and me] were told, as I recall, that originally the term byte
was used by some to represent 7 bits. IBM took credit for standardizing
the term on 8 bits.
--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
Internet: [email protected] [email protected]