Timeline for answer to Is there a name for this famous “memeish” rhythm? by ojs
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| Jan 9, 2024 at 10:47 | comment | added | phoog | @DarrelHoffman there were 20 bob in a pound. I'm fairly sure nobody was cutting pounds into 20 pieces -- it's not particularly easy to divide a circle, half circle, or quarter circle into five pieces. Wikipedia says that the origin of the term is uncertain but there is speculation that it derives from the name of Robert Walpole. | |
| May 17, 2021 at 15:51 | comment | added | Darrel Hoffman | @Swedgin Alright, I stand correct on computing bits - the rest is pretty much true though. It actually comes from the Spanish dollar originally, which predates US or UK usage. Just a coincidence that computers also later settled on 8-bit groupings as the de facto standard. Though for similar reasons - you can easily divide something in half (whether a coin, a chunk of computer data, or for that matter a musical beat or a scale) 3 times to get 8, so powers of 2 resulted in the same value in multiple instances. | |
| May 17, 2021 at 15:29 | comment | added | Aaron | @DarrelHoffman 'Claude E. Shannon first used the word "bit" in his seminal 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication".[7][8][9] He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had written a Bell Labs memo on 9 January 1947 in which he contracted "binary information digit" to simply "bit".' (SOURCE) See also: etymonline.com/word/bit and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte. | |
| May 17, 2021 at 15:27 | comment | added | Swedgin | @DarrelHoffman source please, I highly doubt that. In the early days there also could be 6bits (among other values) in a byte, depending on the hardware. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte | |
| May 17, 2021 at 13:29 | comment | added | Darrel Hoffman | @ojs More inflation. For those unaware, 2 bits is equal to 25 cents - fun fact: they used to divide the dollar (which was a coin in those days) into 8 bits - this is actually where we get the 8-bits-to-a-byte conversion which is used in computer science to this day. It's also related to the pirate saying "pieces of eight", because they would literally slice coins into 8 pieces. I believe the pound coin was subject to the same treatment in the UK, which might be where "bob" comes from? | |
| May 17, 2021 at 11:22 | comment | added | RedSonja | Two bob where I come from... | |
| May 17, 2021 at 9:47 | comment | added | ojs | I remember that I first heard it as "two cents" but "two bits" seems to be most common | |
| May 17, 2021 at 8:47 | vote | accept | puccj | ||
| May 18, 2021 at 21:01 | |||||
| May 16, 2021 at 19:41 | comment | added | Mark Bluemel | Roger Rabbit said "two bits", so I reckon that's definitive :-) | |
| May 14, 2021 at 23:59 | comment | added | user50691 | I learned it as 6 bits. Inflation i guess | |
| May 14, 2021 at 23:46 | comment | added | Aaron | @ggcg That's a variant — usually 2 bits. | |
| May 14, 2021 at 23:30 | comment | added | user50691 | 6 bits (I think) | |
| May 14, 2021 at 20:10 | review | Low quality posts | |||
| May 14, 2021 at 20:54 | |||||
| May 14, 2021 at 19:53 | history | answered | ojs | CC BY-SA 4.0 |