Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The term nibble originates from its representing "half a byte", with byte a homophone of the English word bite. [4] In 2014, David B. Benson, a professor emeritus at Washington State University, remembered that he playfully used (and may have possibly coined) the term nibble as "half a byte" and unit of storage required to hold a binary-coded decimal (BCD) digit around 1958, when talking to a ...
A group of four bits, or half a byte, is sometimes called a nibble, nybble or nyble. This unit is most often used in the context of hexadecimal number representations, since a nibble has the same number of possible values as one hexadecimal digit has. [7]
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.
Being a half-byte, the nibble was named as a play on words. A person may need several nibbles for one bite from something; similarly, a nybble is a part of a byte. Because four bits allow for sixteen values, a nibble is sometimes known as a hexadecimal digit. [5]
Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a nibble . In information theory , one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, [ 3 ] or the information that is gained when the value of such a ...
8,192 bits (1,024 bytes) – RAM capacity of a ZX81 and a ZX80. 9,408 bits (1,176 bytes) – uncompressed single-channel frame length in standard MPEG audio (75 frames per second and per channel), with standard 16-bit sampling at 44,100 Hz 10 4: 15,360 bits – one screen of data displayed on an 8-bit monochrome text console (80x24) 2 14
One octet (in most cases one byte) is equal to eight bits and has 2 8 or 256 possible values, counting from 0 to 255. The number 256 often appears in computer applications (especially on 8-bit systems) such as:
Only a small subset of possible byte strings are error-free UTF-8: several bytes cannot appear; a byte with the high bit set cannot be alone; and in a truly random string a byte with a high bit set has only a 1 ⁄ 15 chance of starting a valid UTF-8 character. This has the (possibly unintended) consequence of making it easy to detect if a ...