[spijdar]

  > I'm so used to bytes being a fundamental primitive in programming languages

Sorry to hijack the question, but tangentially, this actually used to be very unusual.

The B language, C's predecessor, did not have a char data type. Or int, either. Only a single type -- a 16 bit word then.

At the time, most computers used word addressing exclusively, so you couldn't directly access bytes, only words.

This is also why some early computers could easily be e.g. 36 bit machines, like the PDP-10.

C was, thus, an extension of B(CPL) to allow both words and bytes, or "char"s, using the PDP-11's brand new byte addressing. (among other additions like structs)

[Skinney]

I love historical facts like these. Thank you for sharing!