3 ms·

Or maybe it was C? http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/#_36_bit_machines_and_the_persistence_of_octal http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/thin

• cpleppert 4y ago
  The transition started before C, EBCDIC was 8 bits and ASCII was essentially a byte encoding. Unless you were designing some exotic hardware you probably needed to handle text and that was an eight bit byte. One motivation for the C type system was to extend the B programming language to support ASCII characters.