Re: NAS alternative to my junky Airport Extreme

Andrew Stephenson <ames@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "Rowland McDonnell" writes:

Andrew Stephenson <ames@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "Rowland McDonnell" writes:

Makes you wonder why they invented the word `bytes'. I mean, if
octet works in French and English - well, come on, it'll work in
most European languages, won't it? Or any lingo that's got Greek
influence, at a guess. Octet - group of eight. Yes. Who needs to
invent a new word?

Because (AIUI) a "byte" originally did not necessarily mean an
array of eight bits. The PC (as in personal computer, ie pre-
IBM PC) settled it down at eight.

AIUI, a byte has always referred to as an array of eight bits.

You're thinking about `word', surely?

No, shirley, I am thinking about a 'byte'. AIUI, the number of
bits actually used for storage (around that size, of course) is
usually 8 but there have definitely (unless memory is playing a
damnfool game with me) been 'bytes' -- as units of synchronised
memory moving their contents at once -- of 9 and other sizes.

Tell me more.

ISTR it concerned error detection: one extra bit was for parity
checking;

Oh, no, that's not `9 bit bytes', that's `8 bit bytes with a 9th bit for
error detection'. a 9 bit byte would be one that had 9 bits of `data
for the computer' rather than `8 bits of data for the computer plus 1
bit to make sure it's right'.

fancier schemes could detect and correct errors; now,
memory being so much more reliable, few people bother with such
extensions.

Seems to me that memory is less reliable, and ECC RAM is more common
than it used to be.

Used to be required for IBM PCs, mind. 9 bit RAM and all that... IIRC
only one Mac model was able to use that 9th bit, and that was a
`special' of some sort.

But it could as easily concern special need: there
is no special reason for 8-bits-per-byte, 7 making better sense
for writing systems based on the Roman alphabet,

You need to wake up severely, you do.

Fewer bits make better sense for writing systems that /are/ the Roman
one; more than 7 bits are needed for writing systems based on it.

Or have you never noticed the huge gaping missing gaps in ASCII?

TeX originally had 7 bit founts. These were fine for American useage.
Knuth knew they were no use for Hungarians or French people because 7
bits is not enough to encode the required alphabets (u/n and l/c) and
punctuation marks.

For example, Hungarian and German both use umlauts. /Different/ umlauts
- so any European encoding needs to have separate slots for `a' `a
German umlaut', `a Hungarian umlaut'. In upper and lower case, don't
forget. And then there's the `Angstrom' symbol - an A with a ring
accent (from the English point of view, anyway). Also required in upper
and lower case. What accents do other languages put on the letter A?

Even before I've got onto the Froggies, `A' needs to appear in not just
two (upper and lower case) forms, but *eight* different forms.

Do you get the problem? 7 bits is nothing like enough for encoding
languages that used the Roman-derived alphabets. Yes, plural. There
are many. Scandinavian types tend to claim that their accented
characters are separate letters in their own right, and not `accented',
but that's just silliness if you ask me.

although maybe
the people who made the decision wanted to allow for extensions
like code pages. On such random events is history constructed.

I have no idea what you're thinking of.

In my recollection, 'word' has long (but maybe not always, so I
am open to updates on this) been 2 bytes in microcomputing

Never meant that to me. One word, one memory location, with those early
micros. Or so I thought.

with
larger compounded units (double word, quad word) being routine.

Hmm.

In bigger machines, yes, 'word' has meant various sizes, to the
point where people needed to say how many bits a word held: eg,
"a 96-bit word". It's nice that terminology has settled down a
(as it were) bit.

It's not nice that terminology changes. `Word' used to be `the size of
the chunk of data the CPU is handling in this operation', or so I
though. Horrible that we've lost a useful bit of jargon that's been
warped into non-usefulness, is another way of looking at it.

Rowland.

--
Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sorry - the spam got to me
http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk
UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Words on the heap
    ... Forth programs tend to be significantly smaller than equivalent functionality coded in other languages. ... The major reason is that it is optimized to encourage great modularity, so there is much higher code density. ... even on very memory-constrained platforms there is far less incentive to re-use dictionary space. ... On today's PC-type platforms, there is typically such a vast amount of memory available that, with Forth's natural memory conservation, it simply isn't sufficiently attractive to be able to discard portions of the dictionary. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: memory allocation questions (newbie)
    ... I think this means something like "a pointer that is ... prepared to point to a memory location big enough to hold an int." ... I think having multiple exit points is not a good idea. ... experience writing programs in high-level languages. ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: Which computer language program is best for undergrads?
    ... % with equality constraints ... that relies upon basic features found in many modern languages. ... management which, as I understand it, Matlab does not. ... I'm not sure what you mean by memory management. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Python from Wise Guys Viewpoint
    ... >>writes a program ought to have a proof that the program is correct in ... It ought to be possible to formalize ... while in languages that don't use arrays as a standard data ... total memory consumption is limited. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Newbie question about "cons"?
    ... I think this is relevant to the history of Lisp. ... mega-large databases of facts that can't all be "in memory" at once. ... ultimately know that there are locality issues no matter what you do. ... In fact, the choice of lists vs arrays in languages, something near ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)