Marshall schrieb:
> On Jan 23, 4:32 am, Frank Hamersley <terabitemigh..._at_bigpond.com>
> wrote:
>> Marshall wrote:[..]
>>
>>> Another example of dividing the undividable:
>>> I can't think of anything more indivisible than the bit. Can't
>>> have less than a bit, can you? I mean, what could a third
>>> of a bit even mean? The very idea is ridiculous. And yet...
>>> I used to work on a system that had a character encoding
>>> that used 5 1/3 bits per character. That's right: five and
>>> one third bits for each character. 2^5.333 ~= 40.32;
>>> the character set consisted of 40 characters, each consuming
>>> about 5 1/3 bits. If you had 3 characters, that was 16 bits.
>>> 5 1/3 * 3 = 16.
>> OK - back it with enough detail to dispell all my concerns about the
>> veracity of your claim. And please do not resort to averages.
>
> You have to actually express some concerns before I can dispel
> them. I can't just pluck them out of your mind after holding an
> envelope up to my forehead. Would it help you to figure out
> how it worked if I said that strings were always a multiple of
> 2 bytes in length?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODCOMP
>
> They used to have some of them at Lawrence Berkeley Labs
> where I worked in the early eighties.
>
> Oh, hell: just imagine three base-40 digits packed in to a
> 16 bit quantity. Fits nicely: 40*40*40 = 64000, not much left
> over at all. Each character consumes five and one third bits.
Surely the internal representation wasn't bits?
Sounds truly fascinating.
My father did computers when they still had magnetic drums for
main memory.
Lots of Greetings!
Volker
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Received on Wed Jan 24 2007 - 15:30:27 CST
