On Jun 29, 2017, at 11:18 AM, Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote: > > 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.
That, too. Again I give the example of a 12-bit PDP-8 storing 6-bit packed ASCII text. The word size is 12, and the byte size is 6. The same machine could instead store 7-bit ASCII from the ASR-33 in its 12-bit words, and we could then speak of 7-bit bytes and 12-bit words. This, too, was a thing in the PDP-8 world, though rarer, since the core memory field size was 4k words, and the base machine config only had the one field, so 5 wasted bits per character was a painful hit. > The word "byte" means "by eight”. I failed to find that in an English corpus search.[1] A search for “by eight” turns up hundreds of results (apparently limited to 600 by the search engine) but none of the matches is near “byte.” A search for “by-eight” turns up only one result, also irrelevant. I suspect the earliest print reference to that definition would be much later than the actual coinage of the word in 1956 by Werner Buchholz, making it a back-formation. I’d expect to find that definition in print only after the microcomputer revolution that nailed the 8-bit byte into place. Further counter-citations: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13615764/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Byte#Byte_.3D_By-Eight.3F https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/121127/etymology-of-byte I wish I could find a copy of Buchholz, W., January 1981: "Origin of the Word 'Byte.'" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 3, 1: p. 72 that is not behind a paywall, as Buchholz is the man who coined the word for the IBM 7030 “Stretch,” which had a variable byte size. It used 8-bit bytes for I/O, but it had variable-width bytes internally. We wouldn’t have needed the term “octet” if “byte” always meant “8 bits”. [1]: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ > With each bit of storage costing around 100,000 times what they do now A bit of trivia I dropped during editing from the prior post: a 5 MB RK05 disk drive cost about the same as a luxury car. (About US $40,000 today after CPI adjustment.) Cadillac with all the options or RK05? Let me think…RK05! _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
