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Trivia Tuesday: 24 October 2023 - Bits & Bytes

Ken W. Alger
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

As Wild West Coder progresses, I've started looking into security and password hashing. This requires a lot of changes to the bits and bytes of data. And I'm not talking about the bits that horses use in the Wild West. Werner Buchholz (happy birthday, btw) coined the term "byte" to describe a series of bits. Specifically the number of bits required to encode a character. Today, we think of a byte as being eight bits. A nibble as being four bits, and a quanta as being 1/32nd of a byte. Back in the 1950's when Buchholz coined the phrase byte, how many bits did it require to make one byte?

1) Eight
2) Six
3) Four
4) Two

 

2 Replies 2

Paul Zimmerman
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Huh, I always thought it was 8! I'm gonna guess six... which is twice as many licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop!

Six is correct, @Paul Zimmerman! Although I'm not sure that it has a direct relationship to Tootsie Pops.