Timeline for What is the history of why bytes are eight bits?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 3 at 20:39 | answer | added | gnasher729 | timeline score: -1 | |
| S Sep 7, 2022 at 5:19 | history | suggested | Matthias Braun | CC BY-SA 4.0 | fix spelling, add link |
| Sep 5, 2022 at 7:40 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Sep 7, 2022 at 5:19 | |||||
| Jul 30, 2018 at 15:17 | answer | added | JacquesB | timeline score: 5 | |
| Sep 12, 2017 at 16:44 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Sep 12, 2017 at 17:32 | |||||
| Jul 29, 2016 at 21:45 | comment | added | robert bristow-johnson | > As for addressing and powers-of-two wordsizes, did those early pioneers use addresses to individual bits? < is that also a serious question? in BIT SET, BIT CLR, BIT TGL, and BIT TST operations there is a field in the opcode that defines which bit. 5 bit field for 32-bit words. | |
| Jul 29, 2016 at 14:45 | comment | added | Doval | @khrf9 Building a mental model of mutation (especially when most mainstream languages abuse the = sign for something that's very much not equality), pointers/references/aliasing, and recursion are much bigger hurdles to beginning programmers. Beginners don't even need to understand there's a limit to 32-bit integers just yet, and in any exercise where it would matter they don't need to know the precise number since they should be comparing against a predefined constant. | |
| Jan 30, 2015 at 10:46 | history | edited | gnat | edited tags | |
| Jan 30, 2015 at 10:46 | history | protected | gnat | ||
| Jan 2, 2014 at 0:00 | comment | added | wobmene | I really wonder why 10 bits for a byte were never considered. Number of bits should not be a power of two - we don't need to address bits, only bytes. 10 bits bytes would be very good for begginers in computers: one byte can address one kilobyte, two bytes can address one megabytes, etc... it just feels so natural and eases understanding and programming! 10 bits fit more values and still we can use digits and letters for representation (as we do with hex) - base32 encoding. 10 bits bytes looks like a fair and convenient compromise, hope we will have the chips soon. | |
| Sep 23, 2013 at 14:55 | answer | added | Vatine | timeline score: 6 | |
| Nov 24, 2011 at 4:27 | vote | accept | DarenW | ||
| Nov 17, 2011 at 18:53 | comment | added | Jay Elston | Using word sizes that were powers of 2 were not so important in the "early days". The DEC-10 had a 36 bit word, and the CDC 6000 series had 60 bit words, and index registers with 18 bits. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 5:50 | comment | added | DarenW | Re 12 bits: Back when I first learned digital electronics, in the days of 7400 series TTL, logic gates usually came 4 or 3 to a chip, or 6 inverters on a chip. Handling a 12-bit word would have been doable different ways. As for addressing and powers-of-two wordsizes, did those early pioneers use addresses to individual bits? | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 4:54 | answer | added | A.Rashad | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 2:37 | answer | added | DXM | timeline score: 5 | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:21 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackProgrammer/status/136901772324245504 | ||
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:13 | answer | added | Jerry Coffin | timeline score: 83 | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:05 | comment | added | Mike Dunlavey | Memory and registers weren't so cheap back then, so 8 bits was a good compromise, compared to 6 or 9 (fractions of a 36-bit word). Also, address calculations are a heck of a lot simpler with powers of 2, and that counts when you're making logic out of raw transistors in little cans. | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:03 | answer | added | DeadMG | timeline score: 13 | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:02 | answer | added | Thomas Owens♦ | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:00 | comment | added | Rob | Is the last sentence in jest? A 12-bit byte would be inconvenient because it's not a power of 2. | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 20:00 | comment | added | Mike Dunlavey | @Scott: Yeah, I was going to say it was the IBM 360 (of which Stretch was the forerunner) but Wikipedia's got it all in there. They don't seem to mention the PDP-11, which brought bytes into the non-punch-card world. They also don't mention Univac, which had 9-bit bytes. | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 19:59 | comment | added | FrustratedWithFormsDesigner | So why would you prefer 12 bits to 8? | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 19:53 | comment | added | Scott Whitlock | This might be one of those questions where we can't answer it better than good old Wikipedia. | |
| Nov 16, 2011 at 19:48 | history | asked | DarenW | CC BY-SA 3.0 |