Continuing with my byte-madness from last Friday’s blog entry, how about some more computer storage terms? But this time I delve into the utterly trivial, useless, and fun.

A bit is a bit. And two bits are a quarter. Do you know why?

The two bits = 25¢ thing comes from the old pieces of eight. The Spanish Dollar, or eight reales coin, was used as money in the early United States. The coin could be broken up into smaller pieces. Eight pieces, to be exact. Two pieces were equal to one quarter real. Incidentally, one piece was 12 1/2 cents, which is why the US Stock Market for years used 12 1/2 cents, or 1/8th of a dollar as the basic increment stocks could move up or down.

On today’s computers, there are 8 bits in a byte. A half byte is 4 bits, which is lovingly called a nybble. I’m familiar with that term from my early years in computing. I never really used a nybble in my programming, but there was an Apple II computer magazine called Nibble (which was a play on the major computer magazine of the day, Byte).

16 bits was known as a word. 32 bits were a double-word. And 64 bits were a quad-word. Believe me, when you were a young nerd such as I, those terms had meaning. Today, however, things have gotten silly:

2 bits is often referred to as a tayste or tydbit.
16 bits is a playte or a chawmp.
32 bits is a dynner.
64 bytes is a gawble.

Silly. Silly. Silly.

There are also some odd sizes:

5 bits is a nyckle.
10 bits is a deckle.

Honestly!

I don’t know any programmer friend who uses these terms. In fact, my guess is that they exist merely because some graduate student somewhere had to get his PhD.

New Wambooli Feature. Say hello to the Wambooli Quiz. A new feature where I ask a random or trivial question and you get to provide an answer. Not all the questions are about computers either, so everyone gets a fair chance.

Assembly Language Programmer in Congress. Newly-elected congressman from Illinois, Bill Foster, is the first computer nerd congressman. Okay, seriously: Rep. Foster is a physicist. Apparently he knows how to program Assembly, Fortran, and Visual Basic. And being so smart, I figure that Congressman Foster’s mere presence on the House floor should raise the average IQ by at least 50 points.