In a message dated 2008.05.07 11:37 -0500, Lisi Reisz wrote:
Basicly, a Byte is eight Bits.
Or $1. ;-)
I was going to say that yesterday but I didn't think too many people
would understand it.
For the benefit of those of us who did not understand it...
My guess would be that there is an American/Australian coin worth 12.5 cents,
since that would make sense of this comment.
Is that correct??
Not quite, Lisi - but historically close. The American "dollar" got its
name from anglicizing the low-German "daler" [or German/Bohemian "thaler"
(short for Joachimsthaler, the currency of the Joachim valley)]. Just as
the American dollar is sometimes used as currency in places outside the US,
the Spanish peso was used in British colonial America, under the name
"dollar", to cure the liquidity problem imposed by an inadequate supply of
British coins. The Spanish peso/dollar was worth 8 reales [for that reason
sometimes called "pieces of eight"].
Minting coin was expensive, so coins of larger denomination were
economically preferred, but economically inefficient: the peso/dollar was
too large for many daily transactions. With an inadequate supply of smaller
denominations, there was a practice of cutting the peso/dollar into eight
pieces, or "bits", or "reales". Hence the tradition of 8 bits to the
dollar. After the revolution, when the Americans were coining their own
federal currency, I don't believe they ever actually made a 1/8 dollar coin
(though individual colonies may have done so) -- but tradition dies hard.
- John
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