We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

That's what the PDP-10 community was saying decades ago.

Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many others there might be (or, alternatively, why it'd be significantly different total number of issues than 8 bit bytes had). ChatGPT particularly isn't going to have a ton of training data about the problems with 9 bit multiples running out to hand feed you.

It also works in the reverse direction too. E.g. knowing networking headers don't even care about byte alignment for sub fields (e.g. a VID is 10 bits because it's packed with a few other fields in 2 bytes) I wouldn't be surprised if IPv4 would have ended up being 3 byte addresses = 27 bits, instead of 4*9=36, since they were more worried with small packet overheads than matching specific word sizes in certain CPUs.

I don't know what if we ended up with a 27 bit address space?

As far as ISPs competing on speeds in the mid 90s, for some reason it feels like historical retrospectives are always about ten years off.

Ohh, and then we could write the digits in octal.

Interestingly, the N64 internally had 9 bit bytes, just accesses from the CPU ignored one of the bits. This wasn't a parity bit, but instead a true extra data bit that was used by the GPU.

Aside from memory limits, one of the problems with 32-bit pointers is that ASLR is weakened as a security mitigation - there's simply fewer bits left to randomise. A 36-bit address space doesn't improve on this much.

64-bit pointers are pretty spacious and have "spare" bits for metadata (e.g. PAC, NaN-boxing). 72-bit pointers are even better I suppose, but their adoption would've come later.