Re: [stella] What's magic about a byte?

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


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