A couple of minor comments. 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. The word "byte" means "by eight". It did not always mean 7 bits of data and one parity bit, but it was always 8 bits in total. > A common example would be a Teletype Model 33 ASR hardwired by DEC for > transmitting 7-bit ASCII on 8-bit wide paper tapes with mark parity Thank you for mentioning that. First computer terminal I ever used. I think I still have some of the paper tape somewhere. > The 8-bit byte standard — and its even multiples — is relatively recent in > computing history. You can point to early examples like the 32-bit IBM 360 > and later ones like the 16-bit Data General Nova and DEC PDP-11, but I > believe it was the flood of 8-bit microcomputers in the mid to late 1970s > that finally and firmly associated “byte” with “8 bits”. Again, the word you want is "word". There were architectures with all sorts of weird word sizes. "byte" always meant "by eight" and was a synonym for "octet". As Warren wrote, words did not always encode text as 8 bits per character. Computers with 16-bit word sizes might encode ASCII as three 5-bit characters plus a parity bit, or use two 16-bit words for five 6-bit characters plus 2 meta-bits. With each bit of storage costing around 100,000 times what they do now, and taking 10,000 times the time to move across your communications network, there was a wide variety of ingenious ways to save a bit here and a bit there. Simon. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
