On Mon, 2 Mar 1998 08:24:42 -0500, you wrote:

>In fact, IBM copyrighted the term "byte" which is one of the reasons that
>the international standards community refers to 8 bit quantities as
>"octets".
I always wondered why they used that word - now I know!
>Tom
>
>>
>> That's true, more or less... The word "byte" was originally defined
>> as the amount used to represent one character; when the word was
>> first coined, a "byte" was a six-bit number.
>>
>> However... The 8-bit definition of "byte" predates microcomputers and
>> microprocessors by over a decade; the IBM System/360, designed in the
>> '50s, started to standardize a "byte" as eight bits.  Ever since
>> then, most people have used the word "byte" specifically to mean an
>> eight-bit quantity, and referred to the other sizes -- imprecisely --
>> as "words".
>>
>> -Andy

    
I wonder why no standard term for 16 and 32 bit words has emerged -
perhaps there were just too many people in the business by then for
any one definition to dominate!
 


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