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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: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 01:06:14 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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Cleverness: some
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Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine)

According to Peter Flass  <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:
>>> As late as the last half of the 1980s, we ran some network operations
>>> on a BB&N C-70 machine with 10 bit bytes.  
>> 
>> Good point, I'd forgotten about it.  It was a C-30 with two extra bits in
>> each byte to increase the address space from 16 to 20 bits.
>> 
>> I talked to one of the developers who told me with considerable frustration
>> how much C code implicitly assumed 8 bit bytes.  Well, duh.
>
>C is supposed to be agnostic about data sizes, with a few specifications
>such as “sizeof(short)<=sizeof(int)”.

I realize that early on there was a C compiler for the GE 635, but by
the time the C-70 came along Unix had been running on PDP-11 and Vax
for a while and I doubt any of the programers ever imagined their code
would be compiled for a machine that didn't have 8 bit bytes.


-- 
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