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Yeah, but hear me out - 10-bit bytes!
One of the nice features of 8 bit bytes is being able to break them into two hex nibbles. 9 bits breaks that, though you could do three octal digits instead I suppose. 10 bit bytes would give us 5-bit nibbles. That would be 0-9a-v digits, which seems a bit extreme.
If accessing a bit is really accessing a larger block and throwing away most of it in every case, then the additional byte grouping isn't really helping much.
In clothing stores, numerical clothes sizes have steadily grown a little larger.
The same make and model car/suv/pickup have steadily grown larger in stance.
I think what is needed is to silently add 9-bit bytes, but don't tell anyone.
The elephant in the room nobody talks about is silicon cost (wires, gates, multiplexirs, AND and OR gates etc). With a 4th lane, you may as well go straight to 16 bits to a byte.
Can you imagine the argument for 8bit bytes if we still lived in the original 6bit world of the 1950s? A big part of the move to 8bit systems was that it allowed expanded text systems with letter casing, punctuation and various ASCII stuff. We could move to the world of Fortran 36bit if really needed and solve all these problems while introducing a problem called Fortran.
Got to stop somewhere.
Yeah, but hear me out - 10-bit bytes!
Problem is, not only did we have decades of C code that unnecessarily assumed 8/16/32, this all-the-world-is-a-VAX view is now baked into newer languages. C is good for portability to this kind of machine. You can have a 36 bit int (for instance), CHAR_BIT is defined as 9 and so on. With a little bit of extra reasoning, you can make the code fit different machines sizes so that you use all the available bits.
Note to the author, put this up front, so I know that you did the bare minimum and I can safely ignore this article for the slop it is.
