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The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
The PGP Word List was designed in 1995 by Patrick Juola, a computational linguist, and Philip Zimmermann, creator of PGP. [1] [2] The words were carefully chosen for their phonetic distinctiveness, using genetic algorithms to select lists of words that had optimum separations in phoneme space.
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 ...
For example, the PDP-10 byte pointer contained the size of the byte in bits (allowing different-sized bytes to be accessed), the bit position of the byte within the word, and the word address of the data. Instructions could automatically adjust the pointer to the next byte on, for example, load and deposit (store) operations.
On most modern computers, this is an eight bit string. Because the definition of a byte is related to the number of bits composing a character, some older computers have used a different bit length for their byte. [2] In many computer architectures, the byte is the smallest addressable unit, the atom of addressability, say. For example, even ...
2 −1: 10 −1: 0.415 bits (log 2 4/3) – amount of information needed to eliminate one option out of four. 0.6–1.3 bits – approximate information per letter of English text. [3] 2 0: bit: 10 0: bit 1 bit – 0 or 1, false or true, Low or High (a.k.a. unibit) 1.442695 bits (log 2 e) – approximate size of a nat (a unit of information ...
The word 'Wikipedia' represented in ASCII binary code, made up of 9 bytes (72 bits). A binary code represents text, computer processor instructions, or any other data using a two-symbol system. The two-symbol system used is often "0" and "1" from the binary number system.
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 ...