From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Jun  4 14:54:11 1997
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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199706042150.OAA19091@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: signed/unsigned cpp
To: toneil@visigenic.com (Tim Oneil)
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:50:10 -0700 (MST)
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970604131514.00a368e0@visigenic.com> from "Tim Oneil" at Jun 4, 97 01:15:17 pm
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> A byte is 8 bits, I don't care what architecture you are running on.

On a Harris H-800, which is a 24 bit machine, Hollerith encoding
of characters in FORTRAN (the origin of the "byte") mandated 6
bits.  I believe this was the same for the 12 bit PDP machines
from DEC.  CDC and others had 14 and 28 bit machines, which tended
to use 7 bit bytes.


					Regards,
					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.