X-Nico

28 unusual facts about BIT


24-bit

Engineering Research Associates (later merged into UNIVAC) designed a series of 24-bit drum memory machines including the Atlas, its commercial version the UNIVAC 1101, the ATHENA computer, the UNIVAC 1824 guidance computer, etc.

256-bit

The Efficeon processor was Transmeta's second-generation 256-bit VLIW design which employed a software engine to convert code written for x86 processors to the native instruction set of the chip.

31-bit

Fortunately, most of this was invisible to programmers using high-level languages like COBOL or FORTRAN, and IBM aided the transition with dual mode hardware for a period of time.

32-bit

In digital images/pictures, 32-bit usually refers to RGBA color space -- 24-bit truecolor images with an 8-bit alpha channel—i.e., 8 bits each for red, green, blue, and transparency; a total of 32 bits per pixel.

Furthermore, programming with segments tend to become complicated; special far and near keywords and/or memory models had to be used (with care), not only in assembly language but also in high level languages such as Pascal, compiled BASIC, Fortran, C, etc.

36-bit

Prior to the introduction of computers, the state of the art in precision scientific and engineering calculation was the ten-digit, electrically powered, mechanical calculator, such as those manufactured by Friden, Marchant and Monroe.

48-bit

Computers with 48-bit words include the AN/FSQ-32, CDC 1604/CDC 3xxx, BESM-6, and Burroughs large systems (B5xxx-B8xxx, which additionally had a 3-4 type tag).

Bit

The same principle was later used in the magnetic bubble memory developed in the 1980s, and is still found in various magnetic strip items such as metro tickets and some credit cards.

The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1804), and later adopted by Semen Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Hermann Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like IBM.

Bit-Istar

Stronach and Calmeyer proposed Ravansar as a possible candidate for the place of Bit-Istar.

Bit-Phalanx

Bit-Phalanx is a Netlabel based in London, which started as an artists and events management for unsigned performing and recording artists within the Electronic music genre in 2006.

Bit-synchronous operation

Bit-synchronous operation is a type of digital communication in which the data circuit-terminating equipment (DCE), data terminal equipment (DTE), and transmitting circuits are all operated in bit synchronism with a clock signal.

Bit-tech

In some cases, this resulted in apples-to-oranges comparisons - something that has split the enthusiast's community on many occasions.

Bit.Trip

Void features music by guest composer Nullsleep, and its levels are named after Sigmund Freud's three parts of the human psyche.

Bit.Trip Fate

In addition, the player controls Commander Video's movement independently of his targeting reticule, similar to the style of twin-stick games descended from Robotron: 2084.

Bit.Trip Runner

Bit.Trip Runner is a 2D platformer in which the player takes control of Commander Video, the main protagonist of the Bit.Trip series who had appeared only during cut-scenes in the previous titles.

Bit.Trip Void

Neuse designed it so that it could be open to interpretation by players, though stating that they intended it to delve into starring character Commander Video's psyche, and "what it means to have emotions and personal space."

It features a heavy emphasis on retro-styled visuals and audio, with the audio composed by electronic musician Nullsleep.

Bodhi Linux

The hard float application binary interface of the ARM11, a 32-bit RISC microprocessor ARM architecture with ARMv6 architectural additions, provides enormous performance gains for many use cases.

Boston 8-Bit

These concerts exclusively feature artists who use re-purposed gaming systems (especially the Game Boy and the NES) as a means for the creation of electronic music and Video game art.

Cafu Engine

To that end, the Cafu source code compiles both as 32- as well as native 64-bit software.

Commander Video

Commander Video is an alternate reality game and viral marketing campaign created by Gaijin Games and Aksys Games in order to promote their recently released WiiWare game Bit.Trip Beat.

Dynamic-link library

The file formats for DLLs are the same as for Windows EXE files – that is, Portable Executable (PE) for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and New Executable (NE) for 16-bit Windows.

New Executable

The New Executable (abbreviated NE or NewEXE) is a 16-bit .exe file format, a successor to the DOS MZ executable format.

Robot Honey

The track features heavy use of 8-bit-style synths and electric guitar, and is a love song written fron a robot's point of view.

Stride of an array

In the above code snippet, myArray might well turn out to have a stride of four bytes, rather than three, if the C code were compiled for a 32-bit architecture, and the compiler had optimized (as is usually the case) for minimum processing time rather than minimum memory usage.

Telegraph code

(Demand for accented vowels led to the 8-bit ISO 8859-1. Demand for Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and other letters led to many variations of ISO 8859. Demand for using more than one of these sets of letters at the same time led to the 16 bit Unicode. Demand for Chinese characters led to 20-bit Unicode, which clearly is impossible for any typewriter like formed character mechanical teleprinter, although dot-matrix printers can print Chinese characters.)

The Ultimate Entrepreneur

One of his chief engineers, Edson de Castro, left after failing to get permission to design a 16-bit version of the 8-bit PDP-8 and founded Data General.


A Bit O'Gold

Out of the mare, Annasan, A Bit O'Gold was sired by Grade I winner Gold Fever, a son of the 1987 American Champion Two-Year-Old Colt, Forty Niner.

AltiVec

Unlike SSE2, AltiVec supports a special RGB "pixel" data type, but it does not operate on 64-bit double precision floats, and there is no way to move data directly between scalar and vector registers.

Biniax

The game is usually ported (Biniax-2 mainly), but some remakes exist (like Mojon Twin's version for 8 bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum).

Brad Fregger

He was the producer of Activision's Ghostbusters, the game Hacker, the Atari and Commodore 64 versions of Pitfall II and Shanghai (the first commercial version of Brodie Lockard's Mahjong solitaire), and he designed and produced the first commercial version of computer solitaire (Solitaire Royale, published by Spectrum Holobyte).

CcTalk

ccTalk protocol stacks have been implemented on a range of devices from tiny Microchip microcontrollers with 512 bytes of ROM to powerful ARM7 32-bit processors.

Code page

IBM introduced the concept of systematically assigning a small, but globally unique, 16 bit number to each character encoding that a computer system or collection of computer systems might encounter.

Cry Just a Little Bit

"Cry Just a Little Bit" is a song originally a hit for British singer Shakin' Stevens in 1983, reaching #3 in the UK charts.

Dallas Sportatorium

However, it did gain one last bit of notoriety when Dallas-based Southwest Airlines held an arm-wrestling match between chairman Herb Kelleher and Kurt Herwald, chairman of Stevens Aviation, resulting from controversy over Southwest's use of the slogan "Just Plane Smart" (Stevens claimed that it infringed on its own "Plane Smart" slogan).

Dead Bishop

After a bit of discussion as to why dead bishops keep appearing on the landing, they call for the Church Police (led by Michael Palin), who arrive exactly two seconds later and beseech God to "tell us who croaked Leicester".

Distant Past

The episode title Distant Past was taken from the title of a bit of underscoring in Stephen Sondheim's film score for Alain Resnais's Stavisky.

Egaro

Mayukh-Moinak’s music is very good but the background score by Arijit Singh is a bit too loud drowning the ambient sounds and the dialogue at some places.

Frisky Tom

Mouskattack, a game with similar visuals and gameplay, was published in 1982 by Sierra On-Line for the Atari 8-bit computers and Apple II.

Gotthelf Greiner

Gotthelf Greiner invented together with his cousin and brother-in-law, Gottfried Greiner, independently to Johann Friedrich Böttger, over many years of research work, and in a little bit different chemical composition Porcelain.

Greenplum

Greenplum Database was supported for production use on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.2 (64-bit), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x (64-bit), CentOS Linux 5.x (64-bit) and Sun Solaris 10U5+ (64-bit).

Hammersmith Odeon London '75

#*Contains a portion of "Come A Little Bit Closer" by Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Wes Ferrell and "Theme From Shaft" by Isaac Hayes

Henry Katzenstein

The company's first product to reach the market was an 8-bit CMOS D/A converter intended for video applications.

Hey, Landlord

Roos discovered counterculture sketch group The Committee in San Francisco and cast all members in bit parts in Hey, Landlord.

IBM Series/1

The IBM Series/1 computer is a 16-bit minicomputer, introduced in 1976, that in many respects competed with other minicomputers of the time, such as the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation and similar offerings from Data General and HP.

Internet in South Korea

The ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, made a negative remark on the South Korean internet environment for falling "a little bit behind" due to governmental regulations during a conference with Choi See-Joong, chairman of Korea Communications Commission, and President Park Geun hye

IPhone 5S

It also introduced the A7 dual-core processor, the first 64-bit processor to be used on a smartphone, accompanied by the M7 "motion co-processor", a dedicated processor for processing motion data from its accelerometer and gyroscopes without requiring the attention of the main processor.

Jonathan Lamas

In 2005, Lamas played a bit part in the independent film Mute, directed by Melissa Joan Hart.

Little Bit

"Little Bit" is a song by Swedish recording artist Lykke Li from her debut album, Youth Novels.

Lotus Thompson

An August 1933 Los Angeles Times article made reference to Thompson among a list of actors who accepted $10 to $15 a day for bit roles in films.

NaN

most processors (including those of the Intel/AMD x86-32/x86-64 family, the Motorola 68000 family, the AIM PowerPC family, the ARM family, and the Sun SPARC family) set the signaled/quiet bit to non-zero if the NaN is quiet, and to zero if the NaN is signaling.

Nicole Fiscella

When asked why she wanted to study Nutrition, by The New York Observer, Fiscella replied "Both of my parents are doctors, so we were always the health-nut family. I think I always wanted to do something in the medical field a little bit, but not as far as being a doctor, so this is a good median".

Night Hostess

Silver screen legend Katharine Hepburn (using the alias "Katharine Burns") made her Broadway debut in Night Hostess, playing the bit part of "Other Hostess".

Nonce

Cryptographic nonce, a number or bit string used only once, in security engineering

North on South St.

Both of the singles had a video, yet North on South St. got a bit of popularity because the video was featured on Beavis and Butt-head several years later.

Robert Crouch

He was nominated to make a party political broadcast on the BBC Home Service in October 1948, which he began by saying that he was not sorry to have the chance to do a bit of grumbling on the air.

Roland XP-50

The XP-50's sound engine utilizes a custom 32-bit RISC chip to accommodate its sound generation and effects processing.

Scaniornis

Situated a bit southwestwards — between 44° and 54° North — of its present location due to plate tectonics, in a fairly wet and warm epoch, the region had probably a warm-temperate to subtropical and fairly humid climate, altogether not too dissimilar from today's Black Sea region or French Mediterranean.

Sega Meganet

Sega's 16-bit console, the Sega Genesis (known as Mega Drive in most areas outside of North America) was released in Japan on October 29, 1988, though the launch was overshadowed by Nintendo's release of Super Mario Bros. 3 a week earlier.

Smaky

The Smaky is a line of mostly 8-bit personal computers and accompanying operating system developed by Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and others at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland beginning in 1974.

Smart Lock

Smart locks may use Bluetooth SMART and SSL to communicate, encrypting communications using 128/256-bit AES.

Sonic X-treme

He also was given permission by Hirokazu Yasuhara, the level designer for the majority of the original 16-bit Sonic titles, to post level designs that were going to be put in the game.

Space Communications and Navigation Program

PRN coding - used to reduce power spectral density for low bit rate signals, and for time transfer.

Texas Instruments TMS9900

The TMS9900 was designed as a single chip version of the TI 990 minicomputer series, much like the Intersil 6100 was a single chip PDP-8 (12 bit), and the Fairchild 9440 and Data General mN601 were both one-chip versions of Data General's Nova.

The Cool Kids

Their song "A Little Bit Cooler" was used in a "Most Valuable Puppets" commercial from Nike with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant entitled "Mrs. Lewis".

Ulrich Giezendanner

Giezendanner supported the expansion of the Baregg tunnel (a bit of a bottleneck in the Swiss motorway network) in 2003, and the adding of a second tube of the Gotthard road tunnel.

Virtual DOS machine

VDMs generally also implement support for running 16- and 32-bit protected mode software (DOS extenders), which has to conform to the DOS Protected Mode Interface.

Wes Mannion

In 2001, Wes was involved in a serious incident in which a captive Australian Saltwater crocodile named Graham bit him on the thigh.

Women's Patriotic Association

The WPA began in St. John’s on August 31, 1914, when the wife of the Governor, Lady Margaret Davidson, called upon the women of Newfoundland to “do their bit” for the war effort.

Xcode

Thanks to the Mach-O executable format, which allows for “fat binaries," containing code for multiple architectures, Xcode can build universal binaries, which allow software to run on both PowerPC and Intel-based (x86) platforms and that can include both 32-bit and 64-bit code for both architectures.

Yan Can Cook

Martin's style of presentation is infused with a little bit of humour, with the series shown widely on public television in the United States, on Food Network in Canada and on HTV in Vietnam.

Yes-R

In 2006, Yes-R made his debut as a TV actor in the role of Omar in the film 'n Beetje Verliefd (meaning "Little Bit in Love") directed by Martin Koolhoven.

Yorkton Film Festival

In the era of the Red Scare, the arrival of two Soviet diplomats in small town Saskatchewan caused a bit of a stir.

You're Cut Off!

Gia, Jaqueline, Pamela, Erica, and Jessica get into a fight (not the least bit helped by Jessica's response to Erica's rendition of Kumbaya or Gia's deflated air mattress).