With the advent of wide spread introduction of 16 bit machines the definition of a byte as an 8 bit unit was accepted because ASCII supported character sets for multiple languages, before the 8bit standard there were 6 bit, 7 bit variations of he character sets. Gee, what were teletypes, like the model 15, 19, 28, oh yeah 5 level or 5 bit..with no parity.
On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 2:29 PM Bob Smith <bobsmith...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Sorry, thanks for playing but > Actually half of a WORD is a BYTE, whatever the numerical length is. > Ready for this,half of a BYTE is a NIBBLE. In fact, in common usage, > word has become synonymous with 16 bits, much like byte has with 8 > bits. > What's the difference between a word and byte? - Stack Overflow > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/.../whats-the-difference-between-a-word-and-byte > Feedback > About this result > > On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 1:48 PM Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > On Sun, 2019-01-06 at 12:00 -0600, cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote: > > > Re: off topic - capatob - saratov2 computer Russsian pdp8 > > > > Nothing has changed as regards the number of bits in a byte, a nybble > > is 4 bits, 8 to the byte, and x to the word - this last varies widely > > depending on architecture. > > > > Still, in Spirit, on an octal processor a whole number is a six bit > > 'byte', so the term is appropriate, especially to avoid confusion with > > the word size of two six bit 'bytes'. > > > > Fun. > > > > Jeff > >
