I know what you mean. The word size on these CDC machines was 60 bits,
making them popular for scientific calculations; but this also meant you
had 10 6-bit "bytes" per word! I'm fairly sure that's what we called
them in the early 70s. Oh yes, and octal representation, which helped
when I started working on the HP3000 in 1977 after several years on the
dark side in the land of hex.

John Burke
e-mail: [log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, August 17, 1998 2:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Burroughs (was: HP3000 in the news (sort of))


John Burke writes:

> You left out Control Data. I spent many, many hours on a 6600. BTW, a
>  byte was 6 bits ;-)

One of my pet peeves (I'm just like Stan in that regard) is these
constant
Orwellian re-writes of history, even if accidental. In that regard, the
definition of the "byte" is now completely fouled from its original
definition.

Originally, a "word" size was any length you specified -- and wholly
dependent
on the binary resolution you wanted. It had nothing to do with hardware.
It
was simply arithmetic in its definition.

Clearly, however, very few early processors could process a whole word
in one
GULP. Rather, they had to do it BITE size pieces, in a series of
staggered
steps. If you had an 8-bit processor, your "byte" (notice the clever
respelling) size was 8 bits. If your processor was 16-bits wide, then
your
"bytes" were 16-bits. And so on.

And in continuance of the joke, a "nibble" was defined as half a byte.

But, somehow, over time, a byte became stuck at 8 bits, a nibble at 4,
and an
HP3000 word at 16 bits -- which became redefined with the advent of the
RISC
processors to be 32 bits, and the old 16-bit words demoted to
"half-word"
status, just to further confuse things.

But in actual fact, an R4 number in IMAGE has a word size of 64-bits and
a
RISC machine has a byte size of 32-bits and a nibble size of 16 bits --
or at
least, it should.

Wirt Atmar