Very interesting, the comment about the 8-bit byte! As a commenter on Ars says, there were 36-bit systems that could work with a word as four 9-bit bytes releas

Very interesting, the comment about the 8-bit byte! As a commenter on Ars says, there were 36-bit systems that could work with a word as four 9-bit bytes released as recently as 2011 (the 36-bit Dorado 800 series apparently.)