yup - we bought 1.5Mb of core for our B6700 for ~US$1.25M (in 1976 dollars) - as a 48(+4) bit machine it either had 6 8-bit bytes or 8 6-bit bytes. In practice

yup - we bought 1.5Mb of core for our B6700 for ~US$1.25M (in 1976 dollars) - as a 48(+4) bit machine it either had 6 8-bit bytes or 8 6-bit bytes. In practice ASCII had 7-bit characters and EBCDIC 7-8 bit ones. Teletypes (6-bit) were still around. From the beginning right up to the birth of microprocessors computer architects were still experimenting around these tradeoffs - around the late 70s it all jelled into 8 bit bytes and power of 2 word sizes I think that 8 bits is a nice round number is you move to a memory model that is an array of bytes and an array of words - making everything a power of 2 in size makes the hardware simpler (much the same reason why bcd, and decimal arithmetic have largely disapeared)