bit-widths, was Re: HP Laserjet ..again....

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:

> > If
> > you hold the word width constant, yes, you are right.  But that is not
> > what I was talking about.  In many early computers, the data buss and
> > the word width were the same.
>
> ... and many did not. The 'byte' as a convention for talking about
> memory is just that, a convention, and fails miserably on machines whose
> major casual metric is not a multiple of 8 bits. Many, many machines
> were built on a multiple of 6 bits because that's how many it took to
> define a character.

I always thought that the technical definition of a "byte" is "8-bits".

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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