Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen 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