> Van: Dr. Imre Bartfai <root@PROF.PMMF.HU>
> Aan: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Onderwerp: Re: pic16f84 program memory
> Datum: woensdag 8 juli 1998 7:58
>
> On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Pavel Korensky wrote:

[Cut]
> A small correction: "one line of assembler [assuming it is a processor
> command] is " one WORD, not one byte. AFAIK a byte is always 8 bits, and
a

A small corection-correction : a byte is _anything_ from 1 to X bits.  An
Octet is exacly eight bits.  A Byte is the name of the smallest grouping of
bits in a system (Mostly the Data-bus width). Although most people do not
know any processor with a other grouping than 8 bits-per-byte, earlier
processors had for example 1, 4 or 6 bits-per-byte.  A word is mostly a
double-byte, but can be anything.

As people who know of other-than-eight-bits-per-smallest-grouping are
fading away the 8-bit-per-byte meaning is the only one left.  Exept maybe
for the people who work with micro-chips micro-controllers :-)

> WORD size is context-dependent. For the obsolete S/360 machines, a word
> was 4 bytes = 32 bits (the whole architecture depended on it!). On a PC
> one can say a word is 2 bytes = 16 bits. And for a PIC, a word is 12, 14
> or 16 bits (bites ??? ) depending on the processor type you mean.
> Computationally, the EEPROM size of the 16F84 is 1792 bytes, but it says
> practically nothing useful.

To take all bits of memory and divide by 8 as nothing more than a
sales-manager trick to up the memory-size.  It is as with HD's to divide
the size-in-bytes by 1.000.000 (decimal) and calling the result Mega-Byte.

Greetz,
  Rudy Wieser

P.s.
Does anyone know how the smallest storage-unit (aka a Bit in a binary
system) is called in a Fuzzy-logic system ?  Just curious ...