Caffeinated Otter

Didn't remember to post one out of my big text file of old quiet-work-shift-penned doggerel this morning, so you get an off-the-cuff inadvisable poem while I'm out of the house

Mary made a lithogram
Of one Dorian Gray
Initially a likeness fair
But less so every day

and why they might be better off as 6 bits

wait I thought a byte was always 8 bits?

nope! a byte is whatever size a "character" is, at its smallest. on modern systems, this is pretty much always 8 bits, but for a good while, the most common byte size was instead 6 bits. I'll get into why, and why we swapped, as this post goes on.

so we used to use 6 bit bytes?

yes, in the earliest binary computers, and in many later designs until around the mid 1970s, that was the norm. the reason we swapped is partly the fault of the American Standards Association, but also partly the fault of Johannes Gutenberg, and the fault of some monks in the late 700s choosing a new, faster way to write Latin.