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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Size of SysV "block"
Message-ID: <23693@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 16-Jul-87 20:17:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.23693
Posted: Thu Jul 16 20:17:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jul-87 11:05:20 EDT
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> No, the basic unit on a PDP 10 is not a "byte" it's a "word".

I didn't say a byte was the *basic* unit of memory on the 10.  It
most definitely *did* have the notion of a "byte" in the instruction
set, however (consider the Load Byte, Store Byte, Increment Byte
Pointer, etc. instructions).  Byte pointers indicated the size of the
byte, so there was no single byte size in the hardware; I think the
original software packed 5 7-bit bytes in a word, with one bit left
over.

> "Word" was universal nomenclature for unit of data before IBM introduced
> the 360, the first byte-oriented machine.

Not quite.  The IBM 7030 or "Stretch" supported bit addressing; it
used an 8-bit byte to store characters.  I don't know if they used
the term "byte", but it definitely supported access to bytes.  (And,
if you don't want to consider character-oriented machines like the
14xx series to be "byte-oriented", it's still byte-oriented; Stretch
was not one of those machines.)  I suspect there were other machines
of the general flavor of the 360 out before the 360, as well.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com