Byte sizes

[Tom Peters]

Off topic:

What's really interesting is that the conversation below earned a rating of 
two chilli peppers from my mail program for possible offensive language! I 
looked hard for cuss words, naughty bits, rude implications, etc. and 
didn't see any. The message it is in reply to didn't earn any chillies. 
Hmmm....

At 01:56 PM 3/14/2005 -0800, you wrote:
>On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Eric Smith wrote:
>
>>Any size from 0 to 36 bits.
>
>
>Yeah, why is everyone so hung up on defining "byte"? It's not like
>it's part of some natural order. It's whatever the designers made
>up off the top of their head for some particular task.
>
>It's utterly arbitrary. There's varied interaction with the
>'character' unit over time, but the two are not the same.
>Sometimes they coincide; often they do not.
>
>And with UNICODE, who cares any more? Byte don't mean shit no
>more, it's just an historic leftover.
>
>* When you ask how many bits in a byte, you have to ask "for what
>   machine?".
>
>6-bit characters encompass the old ITA2 (aka "baudot") teleprinter
>codes, which were five bits (*) plus a state maintained in
>parallel in both sender and receiver (aka FIGS and LTRS).  Five
>bits fits the roman alphabet 26 letters plus a few punctuation
>characters.
>
>
>
>(*) Rarely did anyone people before approx. WWII consider the five
>time intervals that make up the data portion of a
>telegraph/teletype character to be "bits". That's a modern
>interpretation.


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