On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Day Brown wrote: > IIRC, the PDP 9 was a six bit, and devilishly complex > to machine code. The subtlety was elegant.
And earlier computers like the IBM 7044 used 4 bits, usually grouped in two "nibbles" to make an 8-bit "byte". 4 bits => 16 characters, 6 bits => 64 characters, 8 bits => 256 characters, 16 bit => 65,536 characters, 32 bits => 4,294,967,296 characters, 64 bit => roughly 1.8 x 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 characters/shades/possible groupings/etc. 7 bits => 128 characters is plenty for upper and lower cases of the Latin alphabet, plus 10 digits and lots of @#$%& symbols and punctuation. > And if what you are going to deliver is text, you do > not need more than 16bit; the human brain simply can > not deal with more complexity than that. Imagine a > 32 bit alphabet of 16,000 characters. ;-} 16 bits should be plenty. You weren't thinking of the 16,777,216 shades of "true" 24-bit color, were you? A practiced eye (like a color matcher) can distinguish about 10,000 shades of green, for example. I remember once seeing a picture of a Chinese Linotype machine, used to cast the 22,000 frequently-used ideograms in a Chinese newspaper. For purposes of comparison, my pocket-sized English dictionary has 35,000 entries, and is about an inch thick. I understand that the Concise (that means "brief") Oxford Dictionary fills about a meter of library shelving. That "simplified" Linotype machine was about the size of a regulation tennis court, filled about eight feet deep with machinery. You can see why laser printers, using digital fonts, are popular alternatives... Boyd Ramsay [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
