According to Bob Wyman:
> 
> This business about Macnamara choosing 7-bits might sound cute but is total 
> fabrication.
	How do you _know_ it is a fabrication?  I think it likely, but _I_
	wasn't farsighted enough to bug Macnamara's office.
>
	[  interesting summary of byte length, coding etc, deleted  ]
>
> The primary resistance to 8 bit characters in recent times came from the Unix 
> world. Most of the vendors of serious operating systems were happy to move to 
> 8 bit characters but the Unix world, as always, lagged behind in picking up 
> the new technology. It took awhile, but new versions of Unix finally stopped 
> tripping over the high bit in characters.
	Interesting and amusing slam!  alas, doesn't square with what I
	know about the systems(Mac, PC, Dec, Unix).  Mr Wyman, we can have
	a pleasant go-around by private E-mail if you'd like?
> 
> If you are looking for a "fun" story related to bit lengths, you should ask 
> the question: "Where did the 8/16/32/64 bit family of computers come from?" It 
> turns out that since a chess board is an 8x8 grid of 64 squares, it is much 
> easier to program chess applications on a machine that has a word length 
> divisible by 8... Strange, but true...
	As a mathematician I'd put a slightly different slant on it.  It is
	easiest to make machinery(be it a light switch or a Josephson gate)
	with _two_ positions: on or off).  When you attach such equipment
	together you get 4 "alternatives" with two hunks of equipment,
	8 choices for 3, 16 for four, etc.   Now once you've got e.g. a
	memory bank configured to have eight bits(256 choices) you can
	cheaply put in a double memory bank, giving 16 bits(65536 choices)

In conclusion I should make a passing reference to Unicode, the effort
to code each glyph with 2 bytes(65536 choices) instead of the standard
one byte as at present.  With 65536 choices there is a fair amount of
room for Chinese, Arabic, kanji, etc.  All politically correct types
should IMHO support this effort.

Best wishes,

Alan McConnell

- -- 
Alan McConnell      The biggest election issues, IMHO:
Pixel Analysis      1.  Campaign finance reform    2.  Campaign finance
(alan@clark.net)    reform   3. Campaign finance reform   4. Campaign fi . .

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