It wasn't sneaky way back then. A "byte" has not always been defined as "exactly 8 bits"; it used to be hardware-dependent. 6-bit bytes were common in systems w

It wasn't sneaky way back then. A "byte" has not always been defined as "exactly 8 bits"; it used to be hardware-dependent. 6-bit bytes were common in systems with word lengths that were multiples of 6 instead of the now-common 8.