> 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.
Byte was more or less "set in stone" in the mid 1960s, with the success of the IBM System/360. During the internal war at IBM to determine whether the S/360 was going to be a 6 bit based machine or an 8 bit based machine, a study showed that a huge majority of the stored digital data in the world was better suited to 8 bits (mainly because of BCD in the financial industry). It had nothing to do with terminal communications, as there just was not much of that back then. When the S/360 turned into the success it was, maybe 1966 or so, it turned into an eight bit byte world. People on this list keep forgetting just how gigantic IBM was back then, and how much influence it had, good or bad. -- Will
