[ih] bytes [Re: "network unix"]

[Bill Nowicki]

Yes, before eight-bit bytes it really was the wild west. For a kick, some probably remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Radix-50

which squeezed three characters (upper case, digits and only a few punctuation marks) into 16 bits. This is mostly to blame for file names having multiples of three characters in their names. It still shows up with all those web pages that end in ".htm" instead of ".html"!  
We had some long debates on Wikipedia if we should use "octet" everywhere, but that never gained ground. I thought all these old encodings were only historical, until last week we got a letter from our state government (yes, where Sillicon Valley is located) that was totally in upper case.
Thanks for the amusements! 

    On Sunday, October 9, 2016 2:31 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
 

     > From: Brian E Carpenter

    > I think the question was really settled in April 1964 when the IBM 360
    > was announced.

I too was going to mention the 360. I'm not sure we can elucidate _precisely_
what led to the focus on 8-bit bytes, so questions like 'would the 360 _on
its own_ have done it' may be forever unknowable. But I do think the 360 was
one of the biggest factors.

The other one I'd point to is ASCII. Technically, one only needs 7 bits for
ASCII, but 7 is odd (although there's no particular reason one couldn't have
odd-length bytes, but it just feels, well, odd), and so I think ASCII was a
big driver to 8-bit bytes; it certainly knocked out 6-bit bytes.

And probably the power-of-two was an influence, too.

    > I think the byte stabilised at 8 bits in my mind because of the PDP-11,
    > rapidly followed by the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800.

The PDP-11 was certainly a factor (I think at one point, before micros
appeared, it was the best-selling computer, in terms of numbers, in history).

I'm not so sure about the micros - I think they may have 'put the last nail
in', but I think they were more of a recognition of reality, than a pusher
thereof.


    > From: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org>

    > Wow, people are actually reading this stuff... 

Hey, you're putting the energy in to write it, the least we can do is read! :-)

    Noel
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