This is clear. Thank you!

Pierre-Alex

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
Priscilla Oppenheimer
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 8:27 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Bit / bytes [7:36562]


Layer 1 just understands bits. Hardware, in general, understands voltage
and no voltage (one or zero). I guess it could understand high voltage and
low voltage. In fact, there's even ternary systems that understand high,
kinda high, and low.

Back in the early days, software engineers got kind of sick of having to
deal with long streams of numbers and decided to aggregate them. An 8-bit
byte worked out for many systems. (There used to be systems that used a
12-bit byte).

So anything that is implemented in software (or software that has become
firmware) uses bytes or perhaps nibbles or words. Most NICs that handle
data-link-layer processes have some software (driver) or firmware (chip
set). Thus, I would say that they deal with bytes or nibbles or words or
floating integers or arrays or link lists or symbol tables or at least
something of a higher order than voltage being present or not.

Priscilla


At 07:12 PM 2/26/02, you wrote:
>Is conversion of bits into bytes and vice versa a function of Layer 1 or
>Layer 2?
>
>I have seen contradictory info.
>
>(I would say it is a layer 2 function because Layer 1 is only physical
>matters like voltage etc... but some one may have a logic to prove me
wrong)
>
>
>thanks,
>
>Pierre-Alex
________________________

Priscilla Oppenheimer
http://www.priscilla.com




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