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bits in a byte

Started by TDragon Dec 12, 2002 at 10:49 AM 8 replies 650+ views
Original Post
TDragon
TDragon
Ok, now I''m curious. I got into an argument with somebody about the number of bits in a byte. He maintained that there were always 8 bits in a byte, no matter what. I said I thought it depended on the operating system; doesn''t DOS do 8 bits to a byte, and Windows 32? (I don''t know about any of the others). So help me if I''m wrong and he was right, I''ll do 75 years penance and be a more ''umble person thereafter, but how exactly does that work anyway? One of the side notes we had was that with 8 bits to the byte, wouldn''t there be more bytes on the HD and therefore more storage space? I had no idea how to go into that one... Twilight Dragon
BradDaBug
BradDaBug
Right now there are no replies, but I''m sure when I hit Reply down there I''m going to see 10 different replies. But who cares.

Different OS''s all have the same number of bits (though I hear some really wacko ones that ordinary people never come across that run on totally different platforms than what ordinary poeple will never come across) in a byte: 8. But different OS''s have different number of bytes in an integer, to make it simple. DOS has 2 bytes in an integer (therefore, 16-bit!) and Windows has 4 bytes (32-bit!).
I like the DARK layout!
CheeseGrater
CheeseGrater
No, you were right, and these guys are wrong.

Some 36 bit machines have 9 bit bytes.

Some really old machines had 4 or 6 bits in a byte.

It does _not_ depend on the operating system, though. It depends on the type of CPU.
SabreMan
SabreMan
quote:
Original post by TDragon
He maintained that there were always 8 bits in a byte, no matter what.

He''s wrong.
quote:

I said I thought it depended on the operating system

It depends on the hardware. A byte is the smallest addressable unit of machine storage. Since that is commonly 8 bits, many folks are given the illusion that a byte is always 8 bits. It ain''t so. For a historical perspective, read this.
mutex
mutex
Lol, you''ll never be able to tell him, "I told you so!"

Jaco vd Westhuizen
Jaco vd Westhuizen
Take for instance the SHARC processor. Its a CPU specifically for DSP tasks. Our embedded platform uses two of them.

Any case, this CPU''s byte == 32 bits ! What a pain!
<$1,000,000 signature goes here>

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