3 ms·
IIRC, the IBM System 360 is the machine that really set the 8 bits == 1 byte convention in stone. Before that you had CDC machines with 6-bit bytes (or Nybbles
by chiph 13y ago
IIRC, the IBM System 360 is the machine that really set the 8 bits == 1 byte convention in stone.
Before that you had CDC machines with 6-bit bytes (or Nybbles if you owned an Apple ][ with a floppy disk)
- mjn 13y agoThere's some subjectivity in where you consider it standardized, but I would put it later than that. Throughout the period when IBM's System/360 was popular, DEC's PDP series was also popular, which used 36-bit words and a somewhat varying definition of what constituted a byte. If I had to pick a date, I'd pick 1977 as when it solidified. A few elements: ARPAnet standardized on octet-based protocols in the early 1970s, and was getting widespread by the mid 1970s; three popular microcomputers based on 8-bit architectures were introduced in 1977 (the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET); and DEC introduced the 32-bit VAX in 1977.
- kalleboo 13y agoAnd thanks to good old SMTP originally not being specified as 8-bit, we get freakshows like UTF-7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7
- npongratz 13y agoI knew bytes were ambiguously sized, but I had thought a nibble/nybble was (A) always half an octet, and (B) a fun Apple coders magazine [0]. But sure enough, I was very wrong on (A): Apple II disk writes were done in "sets of 5-bit or, later, 6-bit nibbles" [1]. Thank you, chiph! [0] http://www.nibblemagazine.com/ http://www.nibblemagazine.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibble#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibble#History
- chiph 13y agoThere's probably some variation in the terminology, but I always used these terms: bit nibble (4 bits) nybble (6 bits) byte (8 bits) word (16 bits) :