On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 12:18 PM, Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote:
> A couple of minor comments. > > On 29 Jun 2017, at 5:39pm, Warren Young <war...@etr-usa.com> wrote: > > > Before roughly the mid 1970s, the size of a byte was whatever the > computer or communications system designer said it was. > > You mean that size of a word. The word "byte" means "by eight". It did > not always mean 7 bits of data and one parity bit, but it was always 8 bits > in total. > > > A common example would be a Teletype Model 33 ASR hardwired by DEC for > transmitting 7-bit ASCII on 8-bit wide paper tapes with mark parity > > Thank you for mentioning that. First computer terminal I ever used. I > think I still have some of the paper tape somewhere. > > > The 8-bit byte standard — and its even multiples — is relatively recent > in computing history. You can point to early examples like the 32-bit IBM > 360 and later ones like the 16-bit Data General Nova and DEC PDP-11, but I > believe it was the flood of 8-bit microcomputers in the mid to late 1970s > that finally and firmly associated “byte” with “8 bits”. > > Again, the word you want is "word". There were architectures with all > sorts of weird word sizes. "byte" always meant "by eight" and was a > synonym for "octet". > > As Warren wrote, words did not always encode text as 8 bits per > character. Computers with 16-bit word sizes might encode ASCII as three > 5-bit characters plus a parity bit, or use two 16-bit words for five 6-bit > characters plus 2 meta-bits. With each bit of storage costing around > 100,000 times what they do now, and taking 10,000 times the time to move > across your communications network, there was a wide variety of ingenious > ways to save a bit here and a bit there. > > Simon. > > In today's world, you are completely correct. However, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_addressing), there was at least one machine (Honeywell) which had a 36 bit word which was divided into 9 bit "bytes" (i.e. an address pointed to a 9 bit "byte"). -- Veni, Vidi, VISA: I came, I saw, I did a little shopping. Maranatha! <>< John McKown _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
