History of the word "byte"
arobase, Salle multimédia
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Origin of the word "byte"
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(Retyped by "French Lurker".)
"Olde English", BYTE, NOV.1976, p.77
I have been on a crusade over the past few years, trying to
discover the true origin of the word "byte", but my efforts have
been unsuccessful. I have begun to think that the origin is lost,
but I have decided on one last attempt.
Since the name of your magazine happens to be the very same
word that has been the source of my frustration, I am hoping that
you can shine some light on the origin of this small word. I have
looked in just about every textbook that I can get my hands on.
If you can provide some relief to my plight, it would be most
appreciated. Thank you for the trouble.
Thomas P. Bishop
PL/C Project Manager
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
I first ran across an etymology of the word "byte" in a book
that I read on the IBM "Stretch" computer borrowed from an
associate of mine at Intermetrics, Inc, where I worked prior to
founding BYTE. In that book, which was published in the early 60s,
a research precursor of the IBM/360 series was being described.
The "Stretch" computer (if I remember correctly) had a large bit
addressable memory, in which the term "byte" was an arbitrarily
coined word used to reference an arbitrary bit string field of
length "n". The term at that time was meant as a generalized
concept of a bit string subfield. When the 360 came out, all that
changed since, after System/360, almost all published literature
references 8 bit bytes. Perhaps a reader can supply a more
definitive answer to the question of the history of the early
"supercomputer" work following the the "second generation"
transistorized computers of the late 1950s and early 1960s... CH
"The word "byte" comes of age...", BYTE, FEB.1977, p.144
(We received the following from W. Buchholz, one of the
individuals who was working on IBM's Project Stretch in the mid
1950s. His letter tells the story.)
Not being a regular reader of your magazine, I heard about
the question in the November 1976 issue regarding the origin of
the term "byte" from a colleague who knew that I had perpetrated
this piece of jargon. I searched my files and could not locate a
birth certificate. But I am sure that "byte" is coming out of age
in 1977 with its 21st birthday.
Many have assumed that "byte", meaning 8 bits, originated
with the IBM System/360, which spread such bytes far and wide in
the mid-1960s. The editor is correct in pointing out that the term
goes back to the earlier Stretch computer (but incorrect in that
Stretch was the first, not the last, of IBM's second-generation
transistorized computers to be developed).
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, page 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 page 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 number
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".)"
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.
Are there any other terms coined especially for the computer
field which have found their way into general dictionaries of the
English language?
W. Buchholz
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