Werner Buchholz: The Word „Byte“ Comes of Age... In: Byte Magazine. 2. Jahrgang, Nr.2, Februar 1977, S.144 (englisch, archive.org): “[…] The first reference found in the files was contained in an internal memo written in June 1956 during the early days of developing Stretch. A byte was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time. The possibility of going to 8 bit bytes was considered in August 1956 and incorporated in the design of Stretch shortly thereafter. The first published reference to the term occurred in 1959 in a paper „Processing Data in Bits and Pieces“ by G A Blaauw, F P Brooks Jr and W Buchholz in the IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, June 1959, pages 121. The notions of that paper were elaborated in Chapter 4 of Planning a Computer System (Project Stretch), edited by W Buchholz, McGraw-Hill Book Company (1962). The rationale for coining the term was explained there on pages 40 as follows: Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (ie, different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite, but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit.) System/360 took over many of the Stretch concepts, including the basic byte and word sizes, which are powers of 2. For economy, however, the byte size was fixed at the 8 bit maximum, and addressing at the bit level was replaced by byte addressing. […] Since then the term byte has generally meant 8 bits, and it has thus passed into the general vocabulary. […]”
bipm.org
Le Système international d’unités. 9e édition, 2019 (die sogenannte „SI-Broschüre“), Kapitel 3, S. 31 (französisch) und S. 143 (englisch) – Randnotiz.
doi.org
Robert William Bemer: A proposal for a generalized card code of 256 characters. In: Communications of the ACM. 2. Jahrgang, Nr.9, 1959, S.19–23, doi:10.1145/368424.368435 (englisch).
Robert William Bemer: Why is a byte 8 bits? Or is it? In: Computer History Vignettes. 8. August 2000, archiviert vom Original am 3. April 2017; abgerufen am 15. September 2018: „[…] I came to work for IBM, and saw all the confusion caused by the 64-character limitation. Especially when we started to think about word processing, which would require both upper and lower case. […] I even made a proposal (in view of STRETCH, the very first computer I know of with an 8-bit byte) that would extend the number of punch card character codes to 256 […] So some folks started thinking about 7-bit characters, but this was ridiculous. With IBM's STRETCH computer as background, handling 64-character words divisible into groups of 8 (I designed the character set for it, under the guidance of Dr. Werner Buchholz, the man who DID coin the term „byte“ for an 8-bit grouping). […] It seemed reasonable to make a universal 8-bit character set, handling up to 256. In those days my mantra was „powers of 2 are magic“. And so the group I headed developed and justified such a proposal […] The IBM 360 used 8-bit characters, although not ASCII directly. Thus Buchholz’s „byte“ caught on everywhere. I myself did not like the name for many reasons. The design had 8 bits moving around in parallel. But then came a new IBM part, with 9 bits for self-checking, both inside the CPU and in the tape drives. I exposed this 9-bit byte to the press in 1973. But long before that, when I headed software operations for Cie. Bull in France in 1965–1966, I insisted that „byte“ be deprecated in favor of „octet“. […] It is justified by new communications methods that can carry 16, 32, 64, and even 128 bits in parallel. But some foolish people now refer to a „16-bit byte“ because of this parallel transfer, which is visible in the UNICODE set. I’m not sure, but maybe this should be called a „hextet“. […]“
ubuntu.com
wiki.ubuntu.com
UnitsPolicy. Ubuntu, abgerufen am 24. April 2010 (englisch).
Werner Buchholz: The Link System. IBM, 11. Juni 1956, 7. The Shift Matrix, S.5–6 (archive.org [PDF; 639kB; abgerufen am 1. Oktober 2022]): „[…] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will be the ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long. Figure 2 shows the Shift Matrix to be used to convert a 60-bit word, coming from Memory in parallel, into characters, or „bytes“ as we have called them, to be sent to the Adder serially. The 60 bits are dumped into magnetic cores on six different levels. Thus, if a 1 comes out of position 9, it appears in all six cores underneath. Pulsing any diagonal line will send the six bits stored along that line to the Adder. The Adder may accept all or only some of the bits. Assume that it is desired to operate on 4 bit decimal digits, starting at the right. The 0-diagonal is pulsed first, sending out the six bits 0 to 5, of which the Adder accepts only the first four (0-3). Bits 4 and 5 are ignored. Next, the 4 diagonal is pulsed. This sends out bits 4 to 9, of which the last two are again ignored, and so on. It is just as easy to use all six bits in alphanumeric work, or to handle bytes of only one bit for logical analysis, or to offset the bytes by any number of bits. All this can be done by pulling the appropriate shift diagonals. An analogous matrix arrangement is used to change from serial to parallel operation at the output of the adder. […]“
Werner Buchholz: Memory Word Length. IBM, 31. Juli 1956, 5. Input-Output, S.2 (archive.org [PDF; 239kB; abgerufen am 1. Oktober 2022]): „[…] 60 is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Hence bytes of length from 1 to 6 bits can be packed efficiently into a 60-bit word without having to split a byte between one word and the next. If longer bytes were needed, 60 bits would, of course, no longer be ideal. With present applications, 1, 4, and 6 bits are the really important cases. With 64-bit words, it would often be necessary to make some compromises, such as leaving 4 bits unused in a word when dealing with 6-bit bytes at the input and output. However, the LINK Computer can be equipped to edit out these gaps and to permit handling of bytes which are split between words. […]“
Robert William Bemer: Why is a byte 8 bits? Or is it? In: Computer History Vignettes. 8. August 2000, archiviert vom Original am 3. April 2017; abgerufen am 15. September 2018: „[…] I came to work for IBM, and saw all the confusion caused by the 64-character limitation. Especially when we started to think about word processing, which would require both upper and lower case. […] I even made a proposal (in view of STRETCH, the very first computer I know of with an 8-bit byte) that would extend the number of punch card character codes to 256 […] So some folks started thinking about 7-bit characters, but this was ridiculous. With IBM's STRETCH computer as background, handling 64-character words divisible into groups of 8 (I designed the character set for it, under the guidance of Dr. Werner Buchholz, the man who DID coin the term „byte“ for an 8-bit grouping). […] It seemed reasonable to make a universal 8-bit character set, handling up to 256. In those days my mantra was „powers of 2 are magic“. And so the group I headed developed and justified such a proposal […] The IBM 360 used 8-bit characters, although not ASCII directly. Thus Buchholz’s „byte“ caught on everywhere. I myself did not like the name for many reasons. The design had 8 bits moving around in parallel. But then came a new IBM part, with 9 bits for self-checking, both inside the CPU and in the tape drives. I exposed this 9-bit byte to the press in 1973. But long before that, when I headed software operations for Cie. Bull in France in 1965–1966, I insisted that „byte“ be deprecated in favor of „octet“. […] It is justified by new communications methods that can carry 16, 32, 64, and even 128 bits in parallel. But some foolish people now refer to a „16-bit byte“ because of this parallel transfer, which is visible in the UNICODE set. I’m not sure, but maybe this should be called a „hextet“. […]“
Gerrit Anne Blaauw, Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr., Werner Buchholz: Planning a Computer System – Project Stretch. McGraw-Hill Book Company / The Maple Press Company, York PA., 1962, 4: Natural Data Units, S.39–40 (archive.org [PDF; 22,7MB; abgerufen am 1. Oktober 2022]): „[…] Terms used here to describe the structure imposed by the machine design, in addition to bit, are listed below. Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (i. e., different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite, but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit.) A word consists of the number of data bits transmitted in parallel from or to memory in one memory cycle. Word size is thus defined as a structural property of the memory. (The term catena was coined for this purpose by the designers of the Bull Gamma 60 computer.) Block refers to the number of words transmitted to or from an input-output unit in response to a single input-output instruction. Block size is a structural property of an input-output unit; it may have been fixed by the design or left to be varied by the program. […]“
Werner Buchholz: Memory Word Length and Indexing. IBM, 19. September 1956, 2. Input-Output Byte Size, S.1 (webarchive.org [PDF; 227kB; abgerufen am 1. Oktober 2022]): „[…] The maximum input-output byte size for serial operation will now be 8 bits, not counting any error detection and correction bits. Thus, the Exchange will operate on an 8-bit byte basis, and any input-output units with less than 8 bits per byte will leave the remaining bits blank. The resultant gaps can be edited out later by programming […]“