Byte sizes (was Re: 2.8M 3.5' floppy (was: three and a quarter loppy?)

[Bjørn]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:26:23 +0100, Johnny Billquist <bqt at Update.UU.SE>  
wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 Bj?rn <bv at norbionics.com> wrote:
>

>>
>> A byte is the smallest INDIVIDUALLY addressable unit of data on a  
>> system.
>
> Nonsense! Where did you get that?

 From Donald Knuth.

>
> Bah. A sixbit character can very well be a byte, it's just a question of  
> if you choose to call it that.
> Byte addressable is not usable as a definition of a byte.

It does not matter if you do not find it usable, as long as it IS the  
traditional definition.
The PDP 10 came long after it had been established.

The most interesting byte is the one Knuth used in his abstract MIX  
machine, which he came up with when he was here in Oslo. To drive home the  
point that bytes were not dependent upon any particular hardware  
implementation, he defined it as able to hold unspecified information, but  
at least 100 different values. I would have thought most people here had  
read his "Fundamental Algorithms"?

Come to think of it, I suppose I once built a computer with 1-bit bytes.  
Early TTL chips were expensive for a student, so the beast was serial with  
a new-fangled LSI 512-bit circular shift register as the memory.

Immediately afterwards Intel announced the 4004...

-- 
Bjørn