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Shouldn’t that be called a word? Or are they afraid the youngsters won’t get it and thus won’t click?
by tgv 5y ago
Shouldn’t that be called a word? Or are they afraid the youngsters won’t get it and thus won’t click?
- Jtsummers 5y agoByte only became standardized as 8-bits later on, it had various numbers of bits depending on the particular architecture historically. Per the article, this particular system had 48-bit words, so 8x6-bit bytes.
- implements 5y agoA byte was the number of bits a particular system used to represent a character - 6 bits was common in the 1960s. 36 bit words were also common then, 6 bytes and handily a ‘sweet spot’ for representing a floating point number.
- bobowzki 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y agoI think you’re confusing bytes and words. A word is multiple bytes. In this case 8 bytes.
- daneel_w 5y agoYes and no - the term was used early to describe the native register size of a microprocessor. Later on, when microprocessors began offering instructions that could deal with varying data size, it became one of several terms used, e.g. the Motorola 680x0 which uses the terms bytes (8 bits), words (16 bits) and longwords (32 bits).
- monocasa 5y agoThis computer had 48-bit words, composed of 8 6-bit bytes.
- Dav3xor 5y agoJust yesterday I was working with a data storage system that uses 6 bit bytes organized into 12 bit words. Haha, this is one of many 6 bit byte systems still used in aviation every day.