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

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> writes:

 Vintage> 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.

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

Not in this community!  Newfangled usage, yes.  If you want a word for
8-bit chunk, nothing smaller, nothing larger, say "octet".  (That
makes you sound like a network geek, admittedly -- it's where the term
originated, I believe.)

	    paul