Re: evolution of bytes, The joy of FORTRAN

On 3 Mar 2025 00:25:42 GMT, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <vq2j3r$v1q6$2@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>
Did any machine offer “byte” addressability with “byte” having any
meaning other than “8-bit quantity”?

 
As late as the last half of the 1980s, we ran some network operations on
a BB&N C-70 machine with 10 bit bytes.  It had a unix OS and I was able
to compile stock "vi" on it (since it did not ship with it).

Interesting. I suppose in C, the “unsigned char” type could hold values up
to 1023. Code that assumed 8-bit bytes would work fine for the most part,
until it started to assume things about overflow behaviour ...