I wouldn't say "all modern architectures use 8 bits". Plenty of DSPs have > 8-bits (SHARCs are 32-bit, ZSPs are 16, 56K-like DSPs are 24. A byte is the smalles

I wouldn't say "all modern architectures use 8 bits". Plenty of DSPs have > 8-bits (SHARCs are 32-bit, ZSPs are 16, 56K-like DSPs are 24. A byte is the smallest thing that a pointer can point at. Something like MIPS (from memory) has 8-bit bytes, but a load instruction loads 4-bytes at a time (and although it has the unaligned load functions which can be convinced to load a single byte, they aren't general purpose)