Re: evolution of bytes, The joy of FORTRAN

According to Peter Flass  <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:

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. 

 
Good point, I'd forgotten about it.  It was a C-30 with two extra bits in
each byte to increase the address space from 16 to 20 bits.
 
I talked to one of the developers who told me with considerable frustration
how much C code implicitly assumed 8 bit bytes.  Well, duh.

>
C is supposed to be agnostic about data sizes, with a few specifications
such as “sizeof(short)<=sizeof(int)”.

I realize that early on there was a C compiler for the GE 635, but by
the time the C-70 came along Unix had been running on PDP-11 and Vax
for a while and I doubt any of the programers ever imagined their code
would be compiled for a machine that didn't have 8 bit bytes.


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