Joseph Gwinn wrote: > No, 8 bits isn't arbitrary. > Computer hardware is simplified if the various word lengths are all > powers of two. > Eight bits was the smallest power-of-two size that allowed the full > Roman alphabet including punctuation and control characters to be coded. > There are 5, 6, and 7 bit codes, all now obsolete: > Five-bit: Baudot, used in teletypes. > Six-bit: Fieldata (Univac and Control Data, and others I assume.) > Seven-bit: ASCII without parity bit. > Eight bit: ASCII with parity bit, and EBCDIC > (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/IBMp690/IBM/usr > /share/man/info/en_US/xlf/html/lr425.HTM) > ASCII came from AT&T, while EBCDIC came from IBM. > And now sixteen bit: Unicode. > (http://unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html)
... 16 bit UCS-2 / UTF-16, ... 32 bit DIS, GB / GBK, UCS-4 / UTF-32 ... 40 bit UTF-EBCDIC ... 56 bit GB and likely more -- E-Mail Sent to this address <blackl...@anitech-systems.com> will be added to the BlackLists. _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
