Naoto

I used to work with an ICL 1903, with a 24 bit "word" and ferrite core storage. Don't ask me what "RAM" it had - I no longer count that low! :-)

Terry

>IIRC, a "word" in the strictest sense is the size of a data entity that is directly addressible (i.e. minimal size of data entity that can be transferred between main memory and CPU register), while a "byte" represents a data element that corresponds to a single character of data. On Control Data mainframes a word is a 60-bit quantity consisting of ten 6-bit bytes (Geez, am I really *that* old?). On Intel 80x86 family of CPUs a "byte" is an 8-bit quantity, a "word" is a 16-bit quantity (two bytes), a "doubleword" is a 32-bit quantity (four bytes), and a "quadword" is a 64-bit quantity (eight bytes). Using typical Intel assembly-language