[geeks] The topic for the day..

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:23:17AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> Why is computer memory nowdays (at least in the "personal computer" field)
> measured in bytes and not words (as I've seen used in the "big iron"
> field)?
> 
> For example, my OpenGenera screenshot shows its available memory in terms
> of megawords:
> 
> http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3163/2502891680_22d67e80b3_b.jpg
> 
> Discuss.

I'm going to guess that it either has to do with workstations, PCs, and
Macs using byte addressing instead of word addressing.  But that is just
a guess since I don't know what addressing model was used on machines
that refer to memory size as megawords.