3 Feb
2021
3 Feb
'21
12:27 p.m.
On 2021-Feb-02 23:32:29 -0500, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu>
wrote:
I'm not sure that 16 (or any other 2^n) bits is that obvious up front.
Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on
8-bit bytes?
Scientific computers were word-based and the number of bits in a word
is more driven by the desired float range/precision. Commercial
computers needed to support BCD numbers and typically 6-bit characters.
ASCII (when it turned up) was 7 bits and so 8-bit characters wasted
⅛ of the storage. Minis tended to have shorter word sizes to minimise
the amount of hardware.
--
Peter Jeremy
I 'm
trying to get my head around a 10-bit machine optimised for C.
How about 23-bits?
That was one of the early ESS machines, evidently
optimized to make every bit count. (Maybe a prime wordwidth helps
with hashing?)
Whirlwind II (built in 1952), was 16 bits. It took a long while for that
to become common wisdom.