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From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.arch
Subject: Re: *Why* do modern machines mostly have 8-bit bytes?
Message-ID: <6814@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-Jul-87 10:46:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.6814
Posted: Mon Jul 27 10:46:09 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Jul-87 04:20:12 EDT
References: <2807@phri.UUCP> <1085@rtech.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 19
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.wizards:3440 comp.arch:1705


The GE 225 series had a 22 bit word. This allowed for 3 ASCII characters
and a flag bit. Since BASIC was developed on one of these machines, it's
fairly easy to see that there was a bias toward recognizing the
statement type by a word compare on the first three characters. This is
why BASIC was single case (and many versions still are, except for
strings), and why the original BASIC had "LET" in front of every
assignment statement.

The 225 had 8k words of memory, with an additional 8k available from
FORTRAN as KOMMON (sic), pronounced "K-common." With this we supported
16 users! It also had an "AAU" (auxilary arithmetic unit) which did
floating point arithmetic in hardware. This was state of the art in
1962.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {chinet | philabs | sesimo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me