271–280 of 359 posts
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One of the nice features of 8 bit bytes is being able to break them into two hex nibbles. 9 bits breaks that, though you could do three octal digits instead I suppose. 10 bit bytes would give us 5-bit nibbles. That would be 0-9a-v digits, which seems a bit extreme.
5 bit nibbles could just be Baudot Code (A-Z + some control characters).
Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many…
LLM dren also isn't going to provide anything on how wildly different the home computer revolution would have been with twice as big character ROMs; the personal computer revolution would have been with twice as big code pages 437, 850, and 1252 and an extra CGA attribute bit; the BBS era would have been with 9N1 telecommunications; ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 would have been with space for the C1 control characters with no…
I've always taken it as a given that we ended up with 8-bits bytes because its the smallest power-of-two number of bits that accommodates ASCII and packed BCD. Back in the day, BCD mattered rather a lot. x86 has legacy BCD instructions, for example.
> Thank you to GPT 4o and o4 for discussions, research, and drafting.
That explains a lot.
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Your first paragraph implies 8-bit bytes are a coincidence, which is not true. It was a design decision. A byte in computer is the smallest addressable memory location and this location at that time contained a character. The way characters are encoded is called code. Early computers used 5-bits, which was not enough for alphabetics and numerals, 6 bits was not enough to encode numbers and lower and upper case charac…
Given how many early computers had 18-bit or 36-bit words, the possibility of 9-bit bytes doesn’t seem as unrealistic as you suggest. I don’t see 8-bit bytes as being so inevitable.
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The Soviets had ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun Then they decided to abandon their indigenous technology in favour of copying Western designs
Setun apparently used two bits to represent a ternary value, wasting the 4th state.
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I believe the 360 degrees is attributed to Babylonians, who were using the Sumerian base 60 number system (6*60=360)
I just can't resist, pointing out that a "minute" is what you get when you split up an hour into 60 minute (i.e. the word pronounced my-newt) pieces, and a "second" is what you get if you break a minute into 60 pieces (i.e. you've performed the division a "second" time). By this logic, 0.016 (recurring) seconds should be a called a "third".
"minute" comes from latin "pars minuta" and the "i" should be pronounced like in "minimum"
> By this logic, 0.016 (recurring) seconds should be a called a "third".
It should be "tertia". I found that in German and Polish it was used that way, but don't know about english:
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Wonder why we don’t have 720 degrees… (6!)
360 is base 60. (6*60) Like minutes and seconds. The 12 hours in a day and the 12 months are also 60 / 5. This all connects to ancient Mesopotamia somehow.
I guess, for a sufficiently large value of 12.