In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on
07/06/2005
at 08:17 AM, "McKown, John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>Anymore, a byte is always 8 bits in length.
No.
>In this context, a "byte" is not "8 bits", but rather "the
>fundamental unit of memory addressing" (or some such thing).
No, a byte is what it always was, a consecutive string of bits. The
formal name for an 8-bit byte is "octet".
>The reason, IIRC, is that the PDP systems upon
>which C and UNIX were originally developed were 36 bit machines.
The DEC PDP-7, 9 and 15 were 18-bit machines. C and UNIX were ported
to the 16-bit PDP-11 well before they were ported to the PDP-10 (the
PDP-6 and PDP-10[1] were the DEC 36-bit machines.)
>A 9 bit "byte" could be displayed as 3 octal digits. But could not be
>displayed at all using hex.
Nu, so how does '777'O differ from '1FF'X? It's not more difficult to
display a 9-bit byte in hexadecimal than it is to display an 8-bit
byte in octal. Now, I could make a case that it is inappropriate and
user hostile, but that doesn't make it impossible or even hard.
Note; in CDC-land a byte was often assumed to be 7 bits or 12 bits.
[1] Including DEC-System 10 and DEC-System 20
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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