Bit Addressable Architectures

[Lawrence Crowl]

In article <1988Mar3.182645.703 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp
(Henry Spencer) writes:
>I once had the opportunity to ask Bill Wulf what he thought of bit-oriented
>machines; his answer was "I wish they weren't so damned slow".  I'm afraid
>I haven't seen anything since that invalidates that assessment.  There is
>something to be said for providing bit addressability, but one must realize
>that actually exploiting it will be slow and that there will still be a
>large payoff for trying to work on byte or word boundaries whenever possible.

It seems to me that aligned access to all items larger than a bit would allow
a bit addressable machine to be every bit as fast as a byte or word addressable
machine.  Am I missing something?

A bit addressable machine would allow us to use single bits, nibbles, BCD, etc.
with much greater ease.  Besides, bit addressability seems "right".  (I know,
"right" isn't a rational statement!)
-- 
  Lawrence Crowl		716-275-9499	University of Rochester
		      crowl at cs.rochester.edu	Computer Science Department
...!{allegra,decvax,rutgers}!rochester!crowl	Rochester, New York,  14627