Why byte-addressable memory and not 4-byte-addressable memory?

Question

Why do computers have byte-addressable memory, and not 4-byte-addressable memory (or 8-byte-addressable memory for 64bit)? Yeah, I see how it could be useful sometimes, it

Answer 1

We needed to settle down on some size for standardization. People chose 8-bit size for the reasons mentioned by Shane above. since then we are stuck with byte addressable memory. now it is impossible to change due to various compatibility issues and the fact that OPCODES are a byte long only. but using a trick, memory is easily made word-addressable to fetch/store data/addresses!