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We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

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Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#261

Post by iainmerrick »

calebh wrote: post #187

Perhaps the reason modern programs use so much memory vs what I remember from the Windows XP era is precisely because we went to 64 bits. Imagine how many pointers are used in the average program. When we switched over to 64 bits, the memory used by all those pointers instantly doubled. It's clear that 32 bits wasn't enough, but maybe some intermediate number between 32 and 64 would have added sufficient capacity wit…

I agree that's wasteful, but if software were only 2x bigger, we'd be in really good shape now. Unfortunately there are still another one or two more orders of magnitude to account for somehow.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#263

Post by leni536 »

vincent-manis wrote: post #116
xdennis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when you write articles with AI (the article specifically mentions ChatGPT). The article says: > A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10 This is false. If you ask ChatGPT "Was the PDP-10 a 9 bit computer?" it says "Yes, the PDP-10 used a 36-bit word size, and it treated characters as 9-bit bytes." But if you ask any other LLM or look it up on Wikipedia, y…

Actually, the PDP-10 didn't have any byte size at all, it was a word-addressed machine. (An early attempt to implement C on this machine came a cropper because of this.) It did have a Load Byte and a Store Byte instruction, which allowed you to select the byte size. Common formats were Sixbit (self-explanatory), ASCII (5 7-bit bytes and an unused bit), and (more rarely, I think), 9-bit bytes. My first machines were t…

> It did have a Load Byte and a Store Byte instruction, which allowed you to select the byte size.

Were these instructions atomic regarding interrupts? If not, then these look like shorthands for masking/shifting bit-fields out of words, leaving the word as the smallest atomically addressable unit.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#266

Post by dale_glass »

skissane wrote: post #78
falcor84 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just need 3 valued electronics

The Soviets had ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun Then they decided to abandon their indigenous technology in favour of copying Western designs

Setun apparently used two bits to represent a ternary value, wasting the 4th state.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#267

Post by ordu »

I used to think, how the history of computing and Internet would look like, if computers converged on 3-base system, with trits instead of bits, and trytes instead of bytes.

If one tryte was 9 trites, it would have 3^3=19693 values. All the European characters and a lot of others can be encoded with this. There would be no need to invent char/int integer types in C (with the added mess of short, short short, long, and long long) int would be enough at the time. Maybe at the point when it would become necessary to add different integer types, C would choose a saner approach of stdint.h, and there would be no legacy code playing with legacy integer types?

And 27 trites (or 3 trytes) is around 2^42.8 values, like 42 bits. It would be enough even now, I think.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#268

Post by fnord77 »

ordu wrote: post #267

I used to think, how the history of computing and Internet would look like, if computers converged on 3-base system, with trits instead of bits, and trytes instead of bytes. If one tryte was 9 trites, it would have 3^3=19693 values. All the European characters and a lot of others can be encoded with this. There would be no need to invent char/int integer types in C (with the added mess of short, short short, long, an…

binary is far easier to do in electronics (on or off)

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#269

Post by AndrewOMartin »

jalk wrote: post #229
rich_sasha wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why there are 360 degrees. Not that these are exclusive, but I thought it's a rounding of 365.25 days a year stemming from Egypt. 360 is a pretty useful number of degrees for a starry sky that changes ince a night.

I believe the 360 degrees is attributed to Babylonians, who were using the Sumerian base 60 number system (6*60=360)

I just can't resist, pointing out that a "minute" is what you get when you split up an hour into 60 minute (i.e. the word pronounced my-newt) pieces, and a "second" is what you get if you break a minute into 60 pieces (i.e. you've performed the division a "second" time).

By this logic, 0.016 (recurring) seconds should be a called a "third".

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#270

Post by seanhunter »

adastra22 wrote: post #224
DrNosferatu wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Why not 12 bits?

Why not 10? 1 byte ~= 1k values. Nice easy conversions.

Weird bytelengths were very much the norm in early computing but noone (seemingly) ever mass-produced a 10 bit computer[1].

   In the first 3⁄4 of the 20th century, n is often 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48 or 60. In the last 1⁄3 of the 20th century, n is often 8, 16, or 32, and in the 21st century, n is often 16, 32 or 64, but other sizes have been used (including 6, 39, 128).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instruction_set_...
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