Re: questions about bits and bytes

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Simon Spero writes:
> No, bytes are no always 8 bits - some machines use(d) 9-bit bytes. That's 
> why we have the word octet.

Indeed, machines have come in all flavors of byte size.

Byte size on PDP-6 descended machines, including the PDP-10 and
DECSystem-20, was always variable -- byte pointers could extract any
length from one bit to 36 bits, and byte size was an attribute of
files under several operating systems that ran on that series. I
remember that many of the MIT crowd favored 9 bit Extended ASCII,
using the so called space-cadet keyboards that set the two high bits
when control and meta were hit, and with the area we think of as the
control characters being taken up by other symbols.

"Byte" only came to mean "Eight Bits" consistantly in the last decade
or less. "Octet" is the only really consistant term.

Perry