Re: Recipes?

On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Earl Horsefield <ehorsefield[_at_]usgs.gov> wrote:
>
> According to INTERNET/NSFNET TERMS a byte is "a group of adjacent binary
> digits seen by the computer as a "word." (A byte usually contains either
> seven or eight bits.) "

"Word" is ambiguous and varies by architecture. It's generally a grouping of more than one byte, so I'm surprised at the above description. In the IBM 360/370/390 architecture, a word is 4 bytes (32 bits); units of 2 bytes (16 bits) are called "halfwords" and units of 8 bytes (64 bits) are called "doublewords."

I think that, on the Intel and Motorola architectures, a "word" is two bytes (16 bits).

"Byte" is almost (but not quite) universally 8 bits.

I believe the Univacs of the '60s and '70s had 36-bit words (four nine-bit bytes, as I recall).

-- 
Terry Carroll       | "Report of the Committee On Governmental Affairs,
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