Subject: Re: [stella] What's magic about a byte? From: Ruffin Bailey <rufwork@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 10:11:18 -0400 |
On Apr 11, 2005, at 8:15 PM, Darrell Spice, Jr. wrote: > A byte is enough bits to represent 1 character. ... Ah! Perfect; that makes sense and explains the whole 7 bit character jive you run into coding for email. It's interesting on some level, I guess (and this is why I emailed here -- I figured it was convention, and hoped the 2600 was early enough that it was influenced by the convention's creation, though I suppose I'm a little late), that the 2600 has 8 bit bytes. Now I still have to wonder as the 2600 isn't really using the bytes for characters, but I suppose the 8 bit byte was already a standard/the 6507 was designed for generic computing purposes. Neat. Thanks -- I appreciate it. > On older systems a > byte was only 6 bits because they only used uppercase, numbers and a > few other characters ... which explains WHY SOME PEOPLE STILL THINK IT'S OKAY TO HAVE TEXT THAT LOOKS LIKE THIS. PERHAPS THEY'RE STUCK ON 6 BIT BYTE COMPUTERS (I did play a MUD with Novaterm and my C=64 a few years back...) Hrm, I'll have to go back and check and see if the text RPG for the 'grain from a while ago had upper and lower case. > Google on 6 bit byte or 7 bit byte and you'll turn up lots of other > info. But that would imply that I don't like conversing with humans -- or at least Turing Test passing entities. Thanks again for the quick sum up. Ruffin Bailey Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://stella.biglist.com
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