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Because the data the bus carries is in Binary form. Each byte in binary is a group of 8 bits, so making the bus widths multiples of eight allows for the transportation of the Binary data. Prior to the introduction of the 8 bit byte and the EBCDIC character set by IBM in 1964 for their new System/360 series of computers, the standard bus widths used on computers were: 12, 18, 36, 72, and 144 (with a small minority that had 24, 48, or 60) because the standard binary character size was 6 bits and these bus widths are all multiples of 6.

You always want the computer to be able to read/write whole characters in a single memory operation to optimize efficiency regardless of the number of bits in the character.

Some of the newest computers use a 256 bit wide bus! Even wider busses are likely in the future.

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9y ago

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