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Quoting Ross Crawford <rcrawford@csi.com>: (...) Not to start a tempest in a teapot but I know of no recent computer language or hardware which defines a byte as anything other than 8 bits. "byte-wide" I/O is always 8 bits wide as are byte-wide (...) (21 years ago, 26-Jun-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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| | Re: Mechanical Memory for Computing
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(...) Various network protocols define bytes as 7-bit + parity. Almost all modern modems still support this, for a simple example. Historically, the hardware-defined 'most covenient' integer size was called the 'word', with word sizes ranging from 4 (...) (21 years ago, 26-Jun-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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| | Re: Mechanical Memory for Computing
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(...) Depends on what you call 'recent' :-) The DEC PDP-8 had 12-bit words with 6-bit bytes, if I recall correctly. There were also computers with 36-bit words containing six 6-bit bytes in one word (DEC 10/20?), or three 12-bit bytes. The DataSaab (...) (21 years ago, 30-Jun-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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| | Re: Mechanical Memory for Computing
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(...) I just had to join in on this one :) I greatly enjoyed playing around with Intel's early 4004 PMOS microprocessor, one of the very first I think. It was a 4 bit per entity (character?) device which was primarily aimed at processing BCD, one (...) (21 years ago, 1-Jul-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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| | Re: Mechanical Memory for Computing
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(...) Hi John, I'd forgotten about the 4040. I thought they went from the 4004 to the 8008 to the 8080, but my memory must be failing me. I really only became aware of microprocessors with the 8080. I invented a clocked pneumatic scheme where you (...) (21 years ago, 1-Jul-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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