I stand corrected and apologise - I genuinely mis-spoke (mis-typed?) myself. I do know that a byte is not (historically) necessarily 8-bits - indeed, I regular

I stand corrected and apologise - I genuinely mis-spoke (mis-typed?) myself. I do know that a byte is not (historically) necessarily 8-bits - indeed, I regularly used to program machines on which the basic memory unit was 12 bits. The other reply to my comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666345 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666345) gets this right. Again, apologies.