[CentOS] Octet (was: IP6 Anyone?)

Sun Feb 27 13:32:34 UTC 2011
Always Learning <centos at g7.u22.net>

On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:

> Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember 
> "byte" being a synonym for "bit field" and a byte could be any number of 
> bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit 
> bytes were quite common on such machines.

PDP being a 'main franme'?  Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to
Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66?  Level 66 had 36 bit words which
could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters.

> The PDP-11 and microcomputers used 8-bit bytes, and their popularity meant 
> most people using computers at home or in small businesses assumed that 
> that was the only size a byte could be.

Those *were* the days.

 

With best regards,

Paul.
England,
EU.