In the past, storages had a one-byte address organization but a two-byte wide data path and the least significant bit of the storage address which is still a part of the byte address selects the high or low byte. Also, two-byte operations, particularly for I/O operations, were facilitated by the byte address but the least significant bit of the byte address must be zero. Additionally, for two-byte operations the address must be incremented by two and for one-byte operations the address had to be incremented by one. The present invention does not require that the least significant bit of the address be zero for two byte or word operations and incrementing is the same for byte addressing as it is for word addressing. Additionally, for a word or two-byte operation only one address is used up as contrasted to effectively using two addresses in the prior art arrangement. Also, when storage is organized on a byte basis, the even byte boundary locations must be observed when doing two-byte operations. That requirement does not exist when storage is organized on a word or two-byte basis. The present invention for direct addressing provides twice as much addressing compared to storages organized on a byte basis rather than a word basis. Hence, in the present invention, a 16-bit address can address 128K bytes of storage whereas in the instance where storage is organized on a byte basis an address of that size can only address 64K bytes of storage.