[TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2021-Feb-02 23:32:29 -0500, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>  I 'm trying to get my head around a 10-bit machine optimised for C.
>How about 23-bits? That was one of the early ESS machines, evidently
>optimized to make every bit count. (Maybe a prime wordwidth helps
>with hashing?)
>Whirlwind II (built in 1952), was 16 bits. It took a long while for that
>to become common wisdom.

I'm not sure that 16 (or any other 2^n) bits is that obvious up front.
Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on
8-bit bytes?

Scientific computers were word-based and the number of bits in a word
is more driven by the desired float range/precision.  Commercial
computers needed to support BCD numbers and typically 6-bit characters.
ASCII (when it turned up) was 7 bits and so 8-bit characters wasted
⅛ of the storage.  Minis tended to have shorter word sizes to minimise
the amount of hardware.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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