Stuart McLachlan
stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Thu May 19 17:26:48 CDT 2005
On 19 May 2005 at 12:33, John W. Colby wrote: > > >Look up Byte :-) > > Yep, I know about byte. > Clearly you don't. You are calling your 3 bit group a Byte because you were using octal notation and a 3 bit group is represented by a single octal character. By the same reasoning a Byte on your current PC is 4 bits because we commonly use hexadecimal notation which allows a 4 bit group to be represented by one character. External representation of the bit pattern has nothing to do with the meaning of a Byte. Did you ever set a single group of 3 bits by itself or was it always something like "777" to enter a character/opcode etc? Since 36 bit word systems generally used *multiples* of 3 bits for a byte (commonly 9 but sonetime 6 or even 15), using Octal notation to represent bit patterns made sense just as using four-bit hexadecimal notation makes sense if you are using 8 or any other multiple of 2 for your byte. -- Stuart