On Thu, 22 Mar 2001 15:00:55 -0500, Jeff Guevin <jguevin@bu.edu> wrote:
> > On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, marco.cimarosti@essetre.it wrote:
> >> Better if you also keep the distinction between "octet" (a series of
> >> 8 bits) and "byte" (a series of n bits, where n is often but NOT
> >> always 8).
> >
> > When is a byte not eight bits?
>
> The Web version of the Oxford English Dictionary (http://dictionary.oed.com)
> says a byte is always eight bits:
>
I hate to quibble with the OED, but its definition is overly IBM-360-centric.
I'm sure some of you remember the 36-bit-word machines of the 1950s through
80s (and I believe at least one is still in production to this day -- the
heir to the Sperry 1100 line). Many of these machines had bytes of non-8
sizes, and some had variable-length bytes. On the PDP-6 and PDP-10, for
example, bytes were commonly 7 bits long, but could (and often were) any
size between 1 and 36 bits.
I mention this only because these influential but by now largely forgotten
machines are poised to make a comeback, thanks to *several* PDP-10 emulators
that were released in recent weeks.
For more about one of the 36-bit machines, the DECSYSTEM-20, see:
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/dec20.html
and see the links at the bottom if you want to find the emulators. For more
about some of the other 36-bit machines (such as the IBM 701 and its
descendents), see:
http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/timeline.html
None of this has a thing to do with Unicode, so anybody who finds this
interesting is encouraged to "turn on the wayback machine" at:
news:alt.sys.pdp10
- Frank
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