3 ms·

I worked with a 16-bit minicomputer as late as 1995.. word addressable, not byte addressable.

• iainmerrick 2y ago
  I worked on embedded code in the early 2000s using 16-bit DSPs. Texas Instruments C54x if I remember right. Not being byte-addressable was a real pain. There was a C compiler, but off-the-shelf C code hardly ever worked properly because everyone assumes CHAR_BIT is 8.
  • Tor3 2y ago
    The one I worked with had a C compiler as well, though it was K&R and not ANSI. The instruction set supported operations on 8-bit values by op codes which selected the lower or higher 8 bits of a word, so the compiler itself worked transparently as you would expect (the architecture was big endian so that had to be taken into account sometimes, but that's true of byte-addressable systems too).