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Than you! So in short it seems that they needed a byte addressing just to effectively process 8-bits EBCDIC symbols, right? And if symbols were, let’s say 9-bits, they would create RAM with 9-bits addressing, right?
– No Name QA
Commented Jul 8, 2020 at 4:00
Let's be clear. This is not "RAM addressing" as in anything a memory unit necessarily sees. It's the address structure of the instruction set implemented by the CPU. The actual memory hardware may, for example, never see the 2 low bits of the address. But apart from that quibble: yes, the granularity if addressing matches, by design, the unit size of information to be processed. The S/360 designers discussed 6 bit versus 8 bit char sizes (discussed elsewhere in this forum) and if 6 bit had won, I suppose we might have had memory addressable in units of 6 bits.
– dave
Commented Jul 8, 2020 at 11:55

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