Re: Collation (was RE: [OT] o-circumflex)

[Christopher JS Vance]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 12:40:30AM -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
: For example,
: 
: 1984 (Nineteen Eighty Four)
: 1066 and all that (Ten Sixty Six)
: 3001 (Three Thousand One)
: 2050 (Twenty Fifty)
: 2010 (Twenty Ten)
: 2001, A Space Odyssey (Two Thousand One)

You're missing the and from 3001 and 2001.  I know Merkins often
leave it out, but a number of us always use it and feel it's wrong
without.  :-)

Putting dialect aside, you may find that 2050 and possibly 2010 will
be said two thousand (and) whatever.

The problem here is that there's no single way to spell out numbers in
English, so no single way to alphabetise.  It's better to sort numbers
numerically, and then you only have to decide the order for negative
numbers.

-- 
Christopher Vance

Re: [OT] bits and bytes

[Christopher JS Vance]

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 03:39:02PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
: Can anyone clarify for me how big a byte has ever been? (If you could
: identify the particular hardware, that would be helpful.)

On DEC-10, with a 36-bit word, a byte was anywhere between 1 and 36
bits.  They typically packed 5 ASCII-7 characters into a word with the
extra bit unused.  They also packed 6 6-bit (FIELDATA) characters into
a word.

On Univac 1100 series, also with a 36-bit word, partial-word
instructions worked with bytes which were 18, 12, 9, or 6-bits.  The
normal character set was 6 bits, with 6 to a word.  They used 9-bit
bytes for ASCII.

I used both machines in the late '70s.

I believe some Cray machines used a 64-bit word, and put only one
character in a word, giving what might be called a 64-bit byte.

I sometime use the term 'octet' these days for 8-bit bytes.  I find
most people don't like the IEC standard prefixes for multiples.
Who wants to say kibioctet instead of kilobyte (strictly 1024 octets),
or mebioctet instead of megabyte (1024*1024 octets).

-- 
Christopher Vance