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Comment by timclark | Hacker News Reader

Bah humbug! Now I feel like a greybeard - all this arduino stuff is spoiling you. Some of the microcontrollers I used to use only gave you 4 bits to your byte, try telling that to youngsters nowadays!

I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.

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>4 bits to your byte

Did that used to be called a 'nibble' or am I making that up?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte#History

Time was, a byte could be anywhere from 4 to 12 bits, depending on the architecture. A "nybble" is half a "byte".

7 bit bytes were an interesting time. Thank god the System 360 came around and decided to start standardizing things.

I wonder how long it will be before I'm going around saying "In my day, our bits could only be in one of two states!"

Maybe my kids say things like "We had to wait until our methods had been called before we calculated our return values! We couldn't rely on Just-In-Time-Reverse-Causality-Compilation to optimize our code! Get off my hyperlawn!"

Isn't a bit (BInary digiT) by definition in one of two states? Otherwise it would be a "tet" or a "quat"... ;-)

I was actually referring to the qubits of quantum computers, which can be zero, one, or in a superposition of both zero and one. Or something.

Pffft. Real men just implement everything in NAND gates.

Real hackers burn everything in EEPROM. Before testing.

I think you mean ROM. Nothing eraseable about those :-)

...not without X-rays, anyway.

What? Your microcontrollers had bytes?

(I'm just gonna end the joke there. This isn't going anywhere good.)

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