> Having basic experience in any assembly language makes pointers far more clear.

That's a key point. I came to C after several years of programming in assembly and a pointer was an obvious thing. But I can see that for someone coming to C from higher level languages it might be an odd thing.

There was an "official" C compiler for NOS running on the CDC Cyber. As I recall, 18-bit address, 60-bit words, more than one definition of a 'char' (12-bit or 5-bit, I think). It was interesting. There were a lot of strange architectures with a C compiler.

I would also point out architectures like the 8051 and 8086 made (make...they are still around) pointer arithmetic interesting.

The C standard, as I recall defines a byte effectively as at least 8 bits. I've read that some DSP platforms use a byte (and thus a char) that is 24 bits wide, because that's what audio samples use, but supposedly those platforms rarely, if ever, handle any actual text. The standard library contains a macro CHAR_BITS that tells you

I think I remember reading about a C compiler for the PDP-10 (or Lisp Machine?), also a 36-bit machine, that used a 9 bit byte. There even exists a semi-jocular RFC for UTF-9 and UTF-18.