[tahoe-dev] Off-topic: bytes (was: Potential use for personal backup)

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

On 22/05/12 17:54, Saint Germain wrote:
> On 22 May 2012 18:30, Shawn Willden <shawn at willden.org> wrote:
>>>> I don't understand what you mean by "1 Go".
>>>
>>> Giga-octets. Sorry 1 Gigabyte then.
>>
>> Interesting.  That's not an abbreviation I've seen.
> 
> It is often used in France but also sometimes to avoid ambiguous units:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_%28computing%29

Note that the only significant computer system that has ever used the
term "byte" in its official documentation with a definition other than
an 8-bit unit, is the PDP-10. (The PDP-11 had a completely different
instruction set and 8-bit bytes.) In that case it is used to mean a
variable-length bit field, the length being determined dynamically by
a field in the pointer used for addressing:
http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/instruction-set/Byte.html

The PDP-10 used words to measure memory size, i.e. its definition
of byte was not used as a unit.

Some systems define the size of a C 'char' to be greater than 8 bits,
but those are not bytes.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥

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