Byte only became standardized as 8-bits later on, it had various numbers of bits depending on the particular architecture historically. Per the article, this particular system had 48-bit words, so 8x6-bit bytes.
A byte was the number of bits a particular system used to represent a character - 6 bits was common in the 1960s. 36 bit words were also common then, 6 bytes and handily a ‘sweet spot’ for representing a floating point number.
Just yesterday I was working with a data storage system that uses 6 bit bytes organized into 12 bit words.
Haha, this is one of many 6 bit byte systems still used in aviation every day.
I think you’re confusing bytes and words. A word is multiple bytes. In this case 8 bytes.
Yes and no - the term was used early to describe the native register size of a microprocessor. Later on, when microprocessors began offering instructions that could deal with varying data size, it became one of several terms used, e.g. the Motorola 680x0 which uses the terms bytes (8 bits), words (16 bits) and longwords (32 bits).
This computer had 48-bit words, composed of 8 6-bit bytes.