11 Jan
1999
11 Jan
'99
6:59 a.m.
> What I wonder is why people didn't just store
the date as decimal in those
> two bytes. You can go up to the year 65535 that way. I'm positive there
Maybe because the software was written on a machine
(or for an OS that
simulated a machine) using punched cards or something. You can't
necessarily represent 256 different values using standard punches in a
column of a card. Some combinations are illegal.
Nop - or better partly correct - it is true that not every punch
combination was legel (that would be 4096 possible) but at least
there was a legal combination for any possible 8-Bit combination.
Otherways I would have been impossible to boot from a punch card
reader !
Anyway, a 'byte', or more particularly a
character, is not necessarily 8
bits. It may be _now_, but it wasn't then.
I love your comments (and I guess you had also some contact with
these 9 Bit Byte Bull Mini computers :)
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK