Why is a byte 8 bits
2023-03-08 23:58:58.498322+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Over on the Fediverse, Julia Evans @b0rk@jvns.ca has been asking some fascinating questions on things that I've long taken for granted. This morning it was about endian-ness, but the last one was "why is a byte 8 bits?"
She lays out a bunch of reasons in Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes.
Thinking about these has me questioning a lot of my base assumptions. I mean, sure, little-endian makes a lot of sense if you're going to add, potentially set a carry bit, increment an index, add with carry, but in a world pre-ordered cache, does it really matter if that index is being incremented or decremented?
When she asks "Was the motivation mostly that people didn't want their machines to pay the cost of byte order conversion?", I mean, yeah, when memory was that limited swapping around 2 or 4 bytes was expensive, but also....?
And the fact that it's hard to search for a term for a thing when that term hadn't yet made it into the lexicon...