Matthew Walker wrote: > On Thu, April 9, 2009 9:44 am, Nicholas Leippe wrote: >> On Thu Apr 9 2009 09:28:24 Charles Curley wrote: >>> 8 bits = one byte >> On most machines ;) > > Now you've piqued my interest. I'm going to go dig around, and try to figure > out where > that statement isn't true. Thanks for ruining my productivity for a couple > hours. :)
According to wikipedia, "The byte most often consists of 8 bits in modern systems; however, the size of a byte can vary and is generally determined by the underlying computer operating system or hardware. Historically, byte size was determined by the number of bits required to represent a single character from a Western character set. Its size was generally determined by the number of possible characters in the supported character set and was chosen to be a divisor of the computer's word size. Historically bytes have ranged from five to twelve bits." Anyone know of any specific computers that had 5 or 12 bit bytes? It's very interesting indeed. I have always known that a "word" can be just about any size (13 bits, 26 bits, or even 64 bits), but I never knew that bytes had been variable too. Fun stuff! /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
