Timeline for Why did IBM System 360 have byte addressable RAM
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| Jul 8, 2020 at 11:55 | comment | added | dave | 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. | |
| Jul 8, 2020 at 4:00 | comment | added | No Name QA | 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? | |
| Jul 8, 2020 at 2:49 | history | answered | dave | CC BY-SA 4.0 |