At 11:05 PM 3/2/98 -0500, Blad Cap wrote:
>I want to go back to "bit". As far as I had been learnt it comes from
>English word bit what  means smallest piece/amount of information which
>can not by divided or splitted any more.

I had always heard that it was short for Binary digIT.
                                         ^         ^^
>The origin of nibble is quite obscure. I think this is a pure modern
>programmer's jargon rarely being met in literature.

After byte was firmly entrenched as an 8-bit quantity, nybble was coined as
"half a byte".

 - Rick "Back formation" Dickinson



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