10 bit bytes would give us 5-bit nibbles. That would be 0-9a-v digits, which seems a bit extreme.
IPv4: Everyone knows the story: IPv4 had 32-bit addresses, so about 4 billion total.³³ Less due to various reserved subnets. That's not enough in a world with 8 billion humans, and that's led to NATs, more active network middleware, and the impossibly glacial pace of IPv6 roll-out. It's 2025 and Github—Github!—doesn't support IPv6. But in a world with 10-bit bytes IPv4 would have had 40-bit addresses, about 1 trillion total. That would be more than enough right now, and likely sufficient well into the 22nd century.⁴⁴ In our timeline, exhaustion hit in 2011, when demand was doubling every five years. 256× more addresses gets us to 2065 projecting linearly, and probably later with slowing growth. When exhaustion does set in, it would plausibly happen in a world where address demand has stabilized, and light market forces or reallocation would suffice—no need for NAT spaghetti or painful protocol transitions.
UNIX time: In our timeline, 32-bit UNIX timestamps run out in 2038, so again all software has to painfully transition to larger, 64-bit structures. Equivalent 40-bit timestamps last until year 34,857, so absolutely no hurry. Negative timestamps would reach back to year -34,818, easily covering everything from the birth of agriculture to the last Ice Age to the time Neanderthals still roamed Europe.⁵⁵ And yes, probably long enough to support most science fiction timelines without breaking a sweat.
It also works in the reverse direction too. E.g. knowing networking headers don't even care about byte alignment for sub fields (e.g. a VID is 10 bits because it's packed with a few other fields in 2 bytes) I wouldn't be surprised if IPv4 would have ended up being 3 byte addresses = 27 bits, instead of 4*9=36, since they were more worried with small packet overheads than matching specific word sizes in certain CPUs.
As far as ISPs competing on speeds in the mid 90s, for some reason it feels like historical retrospectives are always about ten years off.
Interestingly, the N64 internally had 9 bit bytes, just accesses from the CPU ignored one of the bits. This wasn't a parity bit, but instead a true extra data bit that was used by the GPU.
64-bit pointers are pretty spacious and have "spare" bits for metadata (e.g. PAC, NaN-boxing). 72-bit pointers are even better I suppose, but their adoption would've come later.
C is good for portability to this kind of machine. You can have a 36 bit int (for instance), CHAR_BIT is defined as 9 and so on.
With a little bit of extra reasoning, you can make the code fit different machines sizes so that you use all the available bits.
Or we would have had 27 bit addresses and ran into problems sooner.
But on the other hand, if we had run out sooner, perhaps IPv4 wouldn't be as entrenched and people would've been more willing to switch. Maybe not, of course, but it's at least a possibility.
Or because IPv6 was not a simple "add more bits to address" but a much larger in-places-unwanted change.
A big part of the move to 8bit systems was that it allowed expanded text systems with letter casing, punctuation and various ASCII stuff.
We could move to the world of Fortran 36bit if really needed and solve all these problems while introducing a problem called Fortran.
If accessing a bit is really accessing a larger block and throwing away most of it in every case, then the additional byte grouping isn't really helping much.
A one-bit wide bus ... er, wire, now, I guess ... Could work just fine, but now we are extremely limited with the number of operations achievable, as well as the amount of addressable data: an eight-bit address can now only reference a maximum of 32 bytes of data, which is so small as to be effectively useless.
In clothing stores, numerical clothes sizes have steadily grown a little larger.
The same make and model car/suv/pickup have steadily grown larger in stance.
I think what is needed is to silently add 9-bit bytes, but don't tell anyone.
Got to stop somewhere.
Note to the author, put this up front, so I know that you did the bare minimum and I can safely ignore this article for the slop it is.
FrankWilhoit•2h ago