On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember
> "byte" being a synonym for "bit field" and a byte could be any number of
> bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit
> bytes were quite common on such machines.
PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to
Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which
could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters.
> The PDP-11 and microcomputers used 8-bit bytes, and their popularity meant
> most people using computers at home or in small businesses assumed that
> that was the only size a byte could be.
Those *were* the days.
With best regards,
Paul.
England,
EU.
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