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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: Sat, 1 Mar 2025 01:48:59 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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According to Peter Flass  <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:
>A lot of older machines were character-addressable. The term “byte” hadn’t
>been invented yet. The 1401 (etc), 1620, and many 70xx machines.

Oh sure but I am fairly sure that the 360 was the first machine that
was both character and word addressable with the words at power-of-two
addresses, and a design that allowed word operationw to work as a unit
rather than serially by character.

As far as I know it was also the first character addressable binary
machine.  The earlier ones were decimal.

-- 
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