Kevin Harris & Alison Smith wrote: > I am wondering if anyone knows where the terms nibble and byte came > from. I am told that Bit comes from Binary Digit. Kevin: "Bit" is, indeed, a contraction of "binary digit". The earliest recorded usage was 1948 or '49, by John Tukey. The first usage of "byte" was in the mid-50's; it's generally agreed that Werner Buchholz coined the term while designing IBM's "Stretch" supercomputer. It's an alteration of the noun "bite", meaning "the amount of food taken at a bite"... The "y" was a deliberate safety feature to prevent the word from accidentally being misspelled "bit". "Nibble" is, obviously, a back-formation of "byte"; it's half a byte (4 bits, or one hexadecimal digit). Although it's often spelled "nybble" -- especially by non-programmers -- that spelling implies that it's pronounced "nigh-ble"; every programmer _I_ know spells it "nibble". -Andy === Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com === Fast Forward Engineering - Vista, California === http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499