> Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on

8-bit bytes?

I give the credit to the IBM Stretch, aka 7030, and the Harvest attachment

they made for NSA. For autocorrelation on bit streams--a fundamental need

in codebreaking--the hardware was bit-addressable. But that was overkill

for other supercomputing needs, so there was coarse-grained addressability

too. Address conversion among various operand sizes made power of two a

natural, lest address conversion entail division. The Stretch project also 

coined the felicitous word "byte" for the operand size suitable for character 

sets of the era.

With the 360 series, IBM fully committed to multiple operand sizes. DEC

followed suit and C naturalized the idea into programmers' working

vocabulary.

The power-of-2 word length had the side effect of making the smallest

reasonable size for floating-point be 32 bits. Someone on the

Apollo project once noted that the 36-bit word on previous IBM

equipment was just adequate for planning moon orbits; they'd

have had to use double-precision if the 700-series machines had

been 32-bit. And double-precision took 10 times as long. That

observation turned out to be prescient: double has become the

norm. 

Doug