> From: Grant Taylor > Is "byte" the correct term for 6-bits? I thought a "byte" had always > been 8-bits.
I don't claim wide familiary with architectural jargon from the early days, but the PDP-10 at least (I don't know about other prominent 36-bit machines such as the IBM 7094/etc, and the GE 635/645) supported 'bytes' of any size, with 'byte pointers' used in a couple of instructions which could extract and deposit 'bytes' from a word; the pointers specified the starting bit, and the width of the 'byte'. These were used for both SIXBIT (an early character encoding), and ASCII (7-bit bytes, 5 per word, with one bit left over). > I would have blindly substituted "word" in place of "byte" except for > the fact that you subsequently say "12-bit words". I don't know if > "words" is parallel on purpose, as in representing a quantity of two > 6-bit word. I think 'word' was usually used to describe the instruction size (although some machines also supported 'half-word' instructions), and also the machine's 'ordinary' length - e.g. for the accumulator(s), the quantum of data transfer to/from memory, etc. Not necessarily memory addresses, mind - on the PDP-10, those were 18 bits (i.e. half-word) - although the smallest thing _named_ by a memory addresses was usually a word. Noel