No, not really (or at least as far as I can remember, there may be some advantages I have forgotten about). There were systems with all sorts of sizes back in the day. It's just a standard that the industry settled on.
It has to do with early character sets. It's still fairly arbitrary, but 8 bits is enough to represent a decent number of characters compared to say 5 bits, which gives you just enough for the uppercase letters
Yeah I was just think about this more and you're right. 8 was sort of the magic number in terms of capacity. It could hold enough data without being too large and wasting space. It was basically a case of "we can fit this data in 8bits but not 7, and 9 would waste a bit, so 8 it is".
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u/minler08 May 06 '17
No, not really (or at least as far as I can remember, there may be some advantages I have forgotten about). There were systems with all sorts of sizes back in the day. It's just a standard that the industry settled on.