alt Hacker NewsComputers never used 7-bit bytes similarly to how 5-bit bytes were uncommon, but both 6-bit and 8-bit bytes were common in their respective eras.
Computers never used 7-bit bytes similarly to how 5-bit bytes were uncommon, but both 6-bit and 8-bit bytes were common in their respective eras.
I was asking about ASCII encoding and not the word size. But this information is also useful. So apparently, people were representing both numbers and script codes (EBCDIC in particular) in packed decimal or octal at times. The standardization on 8 bits and adoption of raw binary representation seems to have come later.