
What is the history of why bytes are eight bits?
What were the historical forces at work, the tradeoffs to make, in deciding to use groups of eight bits as the fundamental unit? There were machines, once upon a time, using other word sizes. But t...
bit - Why are CPUs' datapaths multiple of 8? - Software Engineering ...
Apr 30, 2017 · 2 Current and common processing units are 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc bit. Why are their datapath multiple of 8 ? Is this all linked to the fact that the industry has settled with a 8-bit byte ? …
How does it matter if a character is 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit
Jul 23, 2012 · If you use an eight bit sized character, how will you support multiple languages, like Russian and Greek within the same application? What about Chinese or Japanese?
The size of a byte in platform independent software
Dec 9, 2021 · The fundamental storage unit in the C++ memory model is the byte. A byte is at least large enough to contain any member of the basic execution character set and the eight-bit code units …
What is the size of the number 65535 in bytes? [closed]
Aug 30, 2021 · In this representation, 65535 is represented by 16 bits: 1111111111111111. This requires two eight-bit bytes. If the requirement is to have a representation that only handles the two …
How Are RAM Memory Addresses Determined
Apr 24, 2021 · Imagine that you have an 8-bit computer with 8-bit addresses, wired to a single RAM chip. Inside the chip, a multiplexer decodes the 8-bit address to one of 256 values, effectively turning …
Is power-of-two bits per word "convenient"? If it is, why is that?
12 I find several sources claiming that power-of-two bits in a binary word (such as 8-bits per byte) is a "good thing" or "convenient". I find no source pointing out why.
Why is a Boolean value stored as a byte inside of a computer when it ...
Jan 29, 2013 · This isn't strictly speaking true. Some languages (like C/C++) provide ways of storing boolean values as single bits, if these bits are bundled in a single byte. In other words, in C, you can …
history - Why is int in C in practice at least a 32 bit type today ...
Oct 23, 2023 · Now with native 64 bit registers there is the problem that with int = 64 bit you cannot have 8, 16 and 32 bit types in C, because you only have two type names char and short.
unicode - Is UTF-16 fixed-width or variable-width? Why doesn't UTF-8 ...
UTF-8 is defined as a sequence of 8-bit values. It is a uint8_t[]. Each individual code unit is 8-bits in size: a single byte. Now, both UTF-16 and UTF-8 allow for multiple code units (16-bit or 8-bit values) to …