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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: evolution of bytes, The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:11:40 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine)

It appears that Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> said:
>>   8 bits kinda emerged with microprocessors. 
>
>Surely the IBM 360 was responsible for the popularity
>of 8-bit bytes - and that drove the adoption by other
>computer manufacturers if only to support common I/O
>peripherals.

Definitely. Once people saw how successful the 360 was I don't think there were
any new designs that weren't byte addressable. The success of the byte addressed
PDP-11 was the final nail in the coffin for word addressed machines. It seems
obvious now that you can do word processing on a byte addresed machine by
puttihg the N-byte words at 2^N addresses but the 360 was the first system that
did that.

READING COMPREHENSION TEST: the PDP-11 was little-endian, unlike all previous
byte addressed machines that were big-endian. While there are lots of guesses
about why they did that, as far as I can tell, they never wrote down the reason
to switch the byte order, and I have looked in a lot of places.

To pass the reading comprehension test, if you have the long lost document
explaining the decision, please post a link and I will be very grateful, or else
don't reply. To fail the test, post yet another guess about why they switched
the byte order, ideally including this paragraph that you did not read.
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly