Byte addressing 8 bits; in fact, depending on the platform, byte sizes of 1 to 48 bits have been used in the past. Therefore, the term "octet" is used where the context makes byte-length ambiguous. For example, in the 1980s, Honeywell mainframes had 36-bit words, and were byte-addressable in 9-bit bytes, or "nonets", They used 7- or 8-bit character codes, either of which were stored one to each 9-bit byte, making characters individually addressable. To illustrate why byte addressing is useful, consider the IBM 7094, which is word-addressable and has no concept of a byte. It has 36-bit words, and stores its
Byte addressing systems, such as the PDP-10, use word addressing but facilitate access to individual bytes using special instructions which can access memory using a "byte pointer", which contains both a word address and the index of a specific byte within the word. Byte addressing Byte addressing refers to hardware architectures which support accessing individual bytes of data rather than only larger units called words, which would be "word-addressable". Such computers are sometimes called "byte machines" (in contrast to "word machines"). The basic unit of digital storage is called a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common architectures can address