X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Byte


Bight

Byte, a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications

Byte

:Not to be confused with Bite or Bight.

The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer.


Similar

byte | Byte | Byte (magazine) | BYTE |

AACS encryption key controversy

The first fifteen bytes of the 09 F9 key are contained in the RGB encoding of the five colors, with each color providing three bytes of the key.

ANIM

Most of these are strictly of historical interest as the only one currently used is the vertical run length encoded byte encoding developed by Atari software programmer Jim Kent.

Apple III

Apple II cards were compatible but risked violating government RFI regulations, and required Apple III-specific device drivers; BYTE stated that "Apple provides virtually no information on how to write them".

AppleEvent Object Model

The entire AppleEvent architecture identifies things using four-byte OSType codes, studiously avoiding actual words or phrases in English (or any other language).

Backslash

In the Japanese encodings ISO 646 (a 7-bit code based on ASCII), JIS X 0201 (an 8-bit code), and Shift JIS (a multi-byte encoding which is 8-bit for ASCII), the code point 0x5C that would be used for backslash in ASCII is instead rendered as a yen mark (¥), while in Korean encoding, it is drawn as a won currency symbol (₩).

Binary backup

A Backup consisting of exact, byte-level copies of the original data.

A Byte-Level Incremental backup, which examines file differences at the byte level (in contrast with a Block-Level Incremental Backup).

Binary File Descriptor library

Internally, BFD translates the data from the abstract view into the details of the bit/byte layout required by the target processor and file format.

Block availability map

However, these devices (FD-2000, FD-4000, and CMD-HD) did not include a count byte, and the bits in each byte were reversed (high-bit first).

Checksum

Check digits and parity bits are special cases of checksums, appropriate for small blocks of data (such as Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, computer words, single bytes, etc.

CNET

CNET editors such as Brian Cooley, Jeff Bakalar, Bridget Carey and Brian Tong host shows like Car Tech, The 404 Show, Quick Tips, CNET Top 5, Update, The Apple Byte, video prizefights, and others, as well as special reports and reviews.

Core Foundation

The most prevalent use of Core Foundation is for passing its own primitive types for data, including raw bytes, Unicode strings, numbers, calendar dates, and UUIDs, as well as collections such as arrays, sets, and dictionaries, to numerous OS X C routines, primarily those that are GUI-related.

Cromemco Dazzler

The cover of the June 1976 issue of Byte Magazine shows a Dazzler image from Conway's Game of Life, and credits Ed Hall as author of the Life software for the Dazzler.

DBCS

Some IBM mainframes do have true DBCS code pages, which contain only the double byte portion of a multibyte code page.

Dbx

direct byte execution, a tagline used for Jazelle, one of the execution states found in ARM processors

Demo effect

For example, 3D objects rendered in dots are somewhat tricky on systems without byte-per-pixel displays or limited video memory bandwidth, or systems with slow and/or limited (e.g. 8 bit, no FPU) CPUs.

Disk formatting

Physical sectors are actually larger than 512 bytes, as in addition to the 512 byte data field they include a sector identifier field, CRC bytes (in some cases error correction bytes) and gaps between the fields.

Hex dump

When hex dumps are intended to be manually entered into a computer, such as was the case with print magazine articles of home computer era a checksum byte (or two) would be added at the end of each row, commonly calculated as simple 256 modulo of sum of all values in the row or a more sophisticated CRC.

HP roman8

The HP roman 8 charset is a single byte character encoding that is mainly used on HP-UX and some Hewlett-Packard printers.

IGES

In the 1990s, IGES added support for the JIS encoding for Kanji (漢字) as double-byte characters (JIS-6226), allowing members of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) to exchange part models with their American and European partners without loss of the Kanji text.

Jenkins hash function

The Jenkins hash functions are a collection of (non-cryptographic) hash functions for multi-byte keys designed by Bob Jenkins.

Kilobaud Microcomputing

Even more than Byte magazine, kilobaud contained articles written for people who were building their own 8-bit microcomputers at home, or were writing homebrew software for these systems.

KS X 1001

Not all of them encode the standard the same way, like replacing the typical backslash at byte 0x5C with the won currency sign ().

Lucas 14CUX

The 14CUX is capable of storing diagnostic trouble codes in a 32-byte segment of its internal memory that is maintained (even while vehicle ignition is off) by applying 5VDC (regulated down from 12VDC from the vehicle's battery.) Because of this maintainer voltage, the ECU is always drawing a small amount of current.

MK14

It used a National Semiconductor SC/MP CPU (INS8060), 256 bytes of random access memory (RAM) which was directly expandable to 640 bytes on board and 2170 bytes total.

Multicast DNS

Each such string consists of a length byte followed by that many UTF-8 characters.

NBench

Independently of BYTE, in 1996 NBench was ported to Linux and other flavors of Unix by Uwe F. Mayer.

Population count

Hamming weight, the number of non-zero entries ('1' bits) in a byte, string, word, array or other similar data structure

Protocol Builder

Network programming for all kinds of protocols (like TCP, UDP, SNMP ... ) includes converting data to be transferred to a raw bytes in the sending side and parsing these bytes in the receiving side.

RuBee

RuBee utilizes Long Wave (LW) magnetic signals to send and receive short (128 byte) data packets in a local regional network.

Star Fleet I: The War Begins

Jerry Pournelle wrote in BYTE that Star Fleet I "is likely to drive me crazy but I keep coming back for more".

Storage Module Device

34 sectors of 512 data bytes each per track is the configuration used on the GEC 4000 series minicomputers.

User Datagram Protocol

The practical limit for the data length which is imposed by the underlying IPv4 protocol is 65,507 bytes (65,535 − 8 byte UDP header − 20 byte IP header).

Wayne Green

He was formerly editor of CQ magazine before he went on to found 73, 80 Micro, Byte, CD Review, Cold Fusion, Kilobaud Microcomputing, RUN, InCider, and Pico, as well as publishing books and running a software company.

Xsigo Systems

Xsigo awards and achievements include The Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the Network / Internet Technologies category, being named Storage Magazine's Product of the Year in the networking equipment category; also being identified by Byte and Switch as a Top 10 Storage Startup to Watch; also being named by Virtualization Review Magazine as Take Five: Innovative Vendor; and being identified by eWeek as a Top 10 Disruptive New Storage Technology.

Zilog Z280

Zilog added a memory management unit (MMU) to expand the addressing range to 16 MB, features for multitasking and multiprocessor and coprocessor configurations, a 256 byte cache, and a huge number of new instructions and addressing modes (giving a total of over 2000 combinations).


see also