On 2021-Feb-02 23:32:29 -0500, M Douglas McIlroy 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