Question: In the old times 8 bit information and 8 bit computers got along well
There was an ASCII of 8 bits so a single byte is a single charand a single and whole position in memory/disk
then came 16 bit, 32 bit, and 64 bits computers but I lost the path
how chars are stored? Is an 16/32/64 bit ASCII used?
what if I have an 8 bit width data? can I store Many chars in a single position?
for example for 32 bits, if only 8 bits are used, there are 24 bits unused?
memory/disk position-> 0000000 00000000 0000000 xxxxxxx
or are 16/32/64 memory/disk direction still keep pointing to 8 bits instead of 16/32/64-bit-words?
so 8 bits are still alive and kicking? seem YES
EDIT
Forgetting about ASCII, I would like to know if a single address (within memory/disk) is pointing to a single 8 bit byte in a 8/16/32/64 bits platform
Answer: If it’s more than 8 bits, a character is not ASCII by definition. Numbers are still numbers.
Bytes are still bytes. Computers with wider data paths just grab more of them at the same time. A 32-bit system will manipulate 4 bytes at a time natively, and a 64-bit computer will use 8 bytes.
How the disk manages data is a separate issue – it will do it’s own thing internally and respond to the interface (SATA etc) with proper-sized data chunks.