Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!not-for-mail From: John Levine 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 Message-ID: References: <1342120109.762702202.379609.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 01:06:14 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="8253"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" In-Reply-To: <1342120109.762702202.379609.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> Cleverness: some X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010) Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine) According to Peter Flass : >>> 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